


The Dragon's Daughter

by Defenestratio



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Incarcerated Lecter, Profane As Fuck Alana, Unplanned Pregnancy, Will Graham's Canon Profanity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-28
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-01-26 22:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1705028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defenestratio/pseuds/Defenestratio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal Lecter and Alana Bloom have been married four years. They say one gets fat off the spoils of victory and they would be right. Uncovered as a serial killing cannibal, Hannibal Lecter is incarcerated, leaving a stunned silence of betrayal and confusion in his wake. Alana thought things couldn't get worse than the shell-shock, but the pregnancy test proved that wrong quickly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> Divergence from season 2 canon, I'm operating under the assumption that Abigail never dies, Will never gets incarcerated and Lecter never spends an entire season being recklessly dumb manipulating him into all this crap. Essentially the Ripper case dies out and Hannibal continues his life in quiet normalcy, never testing his limits and choosing comfort instead.

She doesn't have much she can understand. Not when it's been two weeks and her head still isn't right and that fatalistic white stick turns the second strip blue and then suddenly she understands everything.

The world is as clear as the glimmer off her wedding ring. And the glimmer off her engagement ring is suddenly too bright for her eyes. She turns the stone inward, ignores the feeling sinking in her gut.

The television footage is nonstop. There are few good graces that keep the press from her door and most of them are Jack Crawford generously surveying her home. She's sure Freddie will turn up and the visit will not be friendly. It will be Freddie following her opportunistic sense of smell, snuffling around her doorstep like a pig for truffles. She's learned to separate where the friendship ends and Freddie Lounds bottom-feeding journalist extraordinaire begins. She doesn't bother to check the Internet or read the paper, but she knows they'll call her some cheap tabloid name. The Cannibal's Bride. Something that will make her curl her fingers into fists. She finds herself visiting TattleCrime. Searching for an excuse to sling some rage Freddie's way to do something besides feel sensationally numb or white-hot angry.

"I need to talk to you, Jack," she says. She's wrapping the telephone cord around and around her arm, her wrist, draping it across her throat, around her neck, her shoulders, like a child spent idle too long. 

"I don't know if the public is the friendliest place you could be for a cup of coffee, Alana." 

"I'm sorry. I didn't know who else to call and I just need--"

"Don't be sorry," Jack Crawford was Hannibal Lecter's best man. Jack Crawford stood beside him with wide, solid shoulders and muttered to Hannibal how beautiful his wife looked. Jack Crawford, filling placeholders for all those empty places that Hannibal's family wasn't. How this must sting. How it speaks of Jack's marriage to justice, to convict a man who he stood next to at the end of a wedding aisle. There's a parallel she's drawing, she knows, between that and the walk to his cell. "Can I come around five o'clock?"

She doesn't know how she isn't crying but she knows only that she isn't. The little strip on that test is the same blue as her eyes. "Yes. Thank you, Jack. Five is great."

"So I married an axe murderer," she says to herself once she hangs up the phone, her hands folded atop the counter. It doesn't sound as funny out loud as it did in her head. "Only this was a lot worse than an axe murderer, I think."

She hopes she's the kind of girl who suffers reasonable morning sickness. It will be very nice to be queasy with a purpose beyond the utter disgust of the spoon fed lies she's still living in. He's everywhere she turns (she's having a hard time rooting him out completely) and that's a little revolting. "So I married a serial killing cannibal?"

That doesn't sound better out loud. She unwinds the phone cords and saunters into the living room to take a nap, but it's fitful and when she dreams she dreams of a little boy with Hannibal's eyes who eats her heart with a baby's scrabbling, gluttonous fists.

* * *

 Jack Crawford never knows what to say in these instances. Bella would know, she was always good at this. He doesn't know if he should be happy or disappointed, can't tell if these things warrant congratulations or a solemn tone. Children have never been his strong-suit. The idea of them has entered and left so frequently in his mind it was more a turnstile than a truly imagined family. So when Alana Bloom says, "I'm incubating the world's cruelest joke," he blinks and stares at her for stupidly long moments.

He waits as she laughs hysterically for a whole two minutes, waits another one as she begins to cry with the gulping ferocity of a woman drowning. He won't insult her by speaking in soft, patient words. He feels like it would be patronizing. That doesn't matter, because once she's done she's excavating the last tears with her fingertips from the corners of her eyes and he can't tell if she's grimacing or chuckling still. But it looks something like relief on her face.

"I'm going to assume this is a currently bad time to ask if you know what it is you might be thinking of doing."

She folds her hands on the counter again, just like earlier when she was alone. Her breath out feels like weight slipping off her chest and that's enough, it really is, to make the air taste bearable. Jack never sits particularly close, but she can't ever shake herself of the tendency she has to turn her body inward, to angle her knees to point at someone when she's comfortable around them.

"It's the worst time. But I'm not letting him remove every single ounce of light from the world. He hasn't completely closed the curtains, Jack. I won't give him that kind of power."

 "But Alana, children? You could--"

In that way that's always infuriated him she reaches across and lays two fingers to his wrist. And like always it stops his speech, he gets it, "This is virtually my field. I know what kind of damage and potential baggage I could impart on a kid. And I plan to be as conscious of it as a parent can be."

"This is going to be tabloid hell, you realize. You're going to suffer a hailstorm from the media worse than what you've already managed. And the likelihood of it being an entirely safe environment for this theoretical child, Alana, we don't know how many people Hannibal's killed or how many of them have names we can uncover. I just need you to understand that there is no outcome here that is absent of how Hannibal's name could cause you serious trouble down the road."

"I'm not," she says coolly. She catches them immediately, the words Jack isn't saying, "I won't drop into the witness protection program and scurry away from him. I have no insight to what supposed type of murderer my husband was-- is--" that requires a swallow to say, "--but he doesn't have it in him to hurt me or this theoretical child. Hannibal couldn't harm a direct connection to himself. Killer or not, we both have always seen the truth of his narcissism."  

For awhile Jack had thought it was funny, when Hannibal loosened up and relaxed after having been married for a few months, and Jack realized that Lecter just spent a large amount of time peacocking at every possible opportunity. It isn't funny once the trait can be linked with the narcissism of a serial killer with a god complex.

Alana is mourning a lot of things. She is mourning the loss of a husband (the man Hannibal was, he’s dead, isn’t he? To her, he has been cleaved free of this new monster he is now, the one she is still afraid to speak to behind a sheet of glass). She is mourning the way selfishness is fleeting (she had briefly considered functional alcoholism, then thought better of it upon realizing she was weighing pros and cons like it was a _job offer)_ and she’ll have to take up decency for the sake of some new life. She is mourning the tree limb that was her life she did not bother to notice was rotting, and now she’s going to have to hack it away. This is going to hurt.

“How did we get here, Jack?” She asks, once she thinks it’s possible. Once he has seemed to relax even a little from this alien silence of his. Jack has never been a talker, but with Alana he tends to speak more than his standard five word sentences. It’s an effect she has on people.

“If you can figure that out, would you tell me?”

She shrugs into her cup of tea that has gone yet untouched. It’s really nothing but a reason to have Jack here, but he would’ve come regardless, so she keeps thinking about how stupid she must look, to be using some pleasantry like _coffee-tea_ as though there’s no history between them. His own cup has been drained halfway.

“I want him to know.” She says, and it’s hardly more than a murmur. Now her lips are around the edge of the cup but it’s for no reason but to mute her voice. “I want to tell him myself.”

“You do whatever you think is the best idea.” There’s a tone in Jack’s voice that says _but if it_ _’_ _s stupid you damn well better rethink it._ He reaches up, points a short, thick finger at her coffee mug, “And given your new development you should give up the caffeine.”

“That’s mostly mythological. But I can cut back.” Jack is her favorite visitor so far. Even Freddie looks at her with some three-ring circus kind of sympathy almost tattooed across her face. Jack is hard to read but never unkind, and that mixes well because he doesn’t feel even remotely _overbearing._ Alana appreciates concern, but there’s a point where all it does is spark in her the desire to shout and cry and it’s never pretty for anyone involved.

 “You’re going to be fine,” he says, but she’s too realistic to believe it.


	2. Humanity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alana's life has hit a really serious new low when her most predominate source of comfort is Freddie Lounds.

This is absurd. But they take the small band from his finger, the simple gold circle, and suddenly he's thrashing and biting. He has accepted every other procedure, every indignity. The Velcro shoes, the orange jumpsuit. He has been surprisingly civil and very polite. There is even an orderly named Barney Matthews who takes some time but eventually he smiles at him and everything is fine until the wedding band. At first, Hannibal seems to the outside world like he has been hurt. Like he has been wounded or injured. He says 'no'. Outright. No.

Chilton insists on it. Says the personal affect isn't acceptable. Stands there with his gimpy walking stick and his smarmy, ugly face, watching Hannibal with some degree of quiet reservation. It isn't smug. It is somehow very impersonal. Distinctly unkind.

Three people have to take him down. Eventually it is Barney who succeeds, his knee pressed so hard into the base of Hannibal's tailbone that is bruising roughly beneath the weight. His face is pushed against the concrete and Hannibal is shaking, his breath rolling madly around off the floor in hot gasps and blowing back up at him. He thrashes at the shoulders. There's a smear of red across his mouth, and one of the other guards is now absent a good chunk of cheek.

He doesn't let up. Not until they sink a needle into him and he goes limp and hazy over time, rag doll useless, demanding with his tongue too big for his mouth that they give back his ring.

When he returns to his logical brain, he is in a water closet of a cell—bruised and shaken up—staring at a light so bright it feels like it is burning a hole in his retinas. Already he has proven to be a horrendous excuse for a prisoner. Almost immediately he has been punished with solitary confinement.

The absence at his left ring finger makes him feel angry again, but he closes his eyes, leans his head against the wall, and drifts.

* * *

 Sometimes Alana wondered if she was too happy. Perhaps it was karma. She's a firm believer in the concept, after all. Perhaps she had stolen too much positivity in the universe. Perhaps she had occupied a place that was, simply, too full of love. Maybe she flirted so openly with the idea of euphoric, decadent, infatuated romanticism that Hannibal had never been this breed of killer until she had tipped the scale just a little too far. Maybe she had incurred this fate and now she was being punished for it— 

No. Not a good route to go down. Not a healthy train of thought. 

"That's insane," she says, both hands flat on her stomach. She's lying in the hollow enormity of the guest room bed with that little tank top pulled up to expose her midriff. She comprehends the thinking that, perhaps, she should converse with this mass of human cells yet to be fully realized in order to endear her to it. She isn't sure it's working, but she can begin to consider the idea of human life brought into this like some shared solidarity. She can begin to appreciate the potential for this being a gift imparted to get her through this.

She really had been considering professional alcoholism before this news. She had the mug picked out and everything, one with which no one would question the Jameson content of her coffee. How absurd. Preparing for a downward spiral. She stopped herself when Hannibal laughed in the back of her mind and told her she was being stupidly clinical. 

She lies there until six AM, chiding herself for her behavior, picking her life apart like the bones of a chicken. She lays it all out, looks at the map and the pieces. Their honeymoon across Europe, all those places she had never gotten to travel, making love and laughing and talking under the moon in every country. She examines every detail with painstaking quality.

She winds up lying on the Florentine leather couch before the unforgiving glow of their seventy-inch flat screen. Blown up larger than life it's all too real and it’s a grainy mess. It's Jack standing beside him at the end of the aisle. It's Freddie's flagrant copper hair in bursts of coiling red clicking away behind the shutter of her huge camera. It's Will Graham's mouth twitching like some nervous happiness, Molly's hand secure in the crook of his arm like a safe weight.

It's the way Hannibal sees her as his wife for the first time and immediately ducks his head against his chest to hide the onslaught of tears.

The doorbell rings just when she pushes over the coffee table, effectively scattering the M&Ms and shattering the expensive candy dish.

When she answers it, a (rudely) familiar voice says, "I’m here because I was concerned when it came to my attention you would be carrying the spawn of Lucifer."

Alana sighs and employs a familiar tactic to let the woman in, slipping behind her door and then pushing it quickly closed, "Hello, Freddie."

* * *

"I don't have anything on me." 

"Pregnancy is categorized as a disease, didn't you know? I'm terminal. Now give me your purse, Freddie."

Freddie Lounds all but throws her bag at Alana Bloom, stopped when the littler woman sharply grabs hold of her arm and turns her around, "I'll take your cell phone, too."

Freddie's hand plunges into her lacy black bra beneath the dark blue top. An iPhone is retrieved (uncomfortably warm in Alana's palm) and set there, Freddie still huffing with the pouty rage of a nasty child. Sure enough, Alana has to click off the recording application (Freddie was sure she wouldn't notice it queued up in the background) and pocket the mobile device.

"I was going to ask if I could use the information—" 

"Not interested," Alana's staring at her, all prepared to chew her throat out until she realizes Freddie is fixed on her paused wedding documentation. She wasn't expecting company, but here it is, and Freddie is never easy company. She wears Alana down in a very particular way, like rocks weathered over time by the tide. "I was doing my own research." 

"How self-punitive." Freddie chirps. She sounds almost cheery. "Warn me when the wedding dress comes out. I'd like to know when I can expect the full Miss Havisham treatment."

"You know what? When your husband accidentally turns out to be a cannibalizing serial killer you can poke fun, but really, fuck you—"

"No possibility for a husband. I'm gay." Freddie hums, settling into the sofa like she very well lives there. Which she does. Like it or not, harsh and scalding to the touch, she and Alana are good friends. "I ordered the mild sauce. Not the fire-hot. Easy, Dr. Bloom… did your centerpiece and you disagree?"

“Right now— and I know how hard this is for you— _right now, can you leave your bullshit attitude out of this?”_

“I suppose I can.” And Freddie does mean it, at least, when she’s told to stop she knows how to pull it back on the reins and ease up. Abigail Hobbs’ autobiography was a surprisingly poignant piece of literature ghost written by this woman, and with Alana as her therapist, eventually she had no choice but to accustom to her. She did not expect that she would like Freddie, but the fact of it has snuck up on her. No two people have ever been so cruel to one another, but it’s the kind of comfortable cruelty Alana Bloom has never had with anyone else. Freddie Lounds was the photographer at her wedding, even.

(It’s never brought up that Freddie breaks the cardinal rule of developing feelings for the straight girl, but Alana doesn’t need to discuss her relaxed views on her own sexuality. She _certainly_ doesn’t need any more added stress in her life, especially when they involve the unholy complication that is constantly Freddie Lounds. There are too many signs for attraction and they’re there in Broadway’s neon lights, writ loud in every inch of how subtle Freddie is not.) 

Much to her surprise, it's Freddie picking up the little candies across the carpet, depositing each into her palm like she's cradling tiny creatures. Little shards of glass everywhere, Freddie is asking her for a dustpan and it's Alana who's almost in tears, like this incredibly nice gesture is some rarity (it isn't). She's having an admittedly hard day and it doesn't look like it will get easier (it might). Maybe this feels like an indication that life might just have some very thin silver lining (it does). She hates looking this imbalanced. When it has happened with Will he has smiled that anxious way he will, excused himself, and gotten up to do just about anything while trying to talk her down. When it happens with Jack he allots her this odd privacy bubble, but he doesn't withdraw. He has a face like a sympathetic teddy bear, truth be told, and it makes Alana laugh to think of what the academy students would say. Freddie is beginning to learn how to handle. At first Alana figured the woman's attitude was patronizing, but really even her sympathy comes across burdensomely sarcastic. Now, it's a restrained urge to speak gently coupled with a little insincere coddling.   
  
"Please sit down and just give me the dustpan."

Alana does this, ducks into the kitchen to root it out from her closet, and when she hands it to Freddie there is a smile pasted onto her face. It seems held there by clothespins, and Freddie really just wishes she’d stop it.   
  
Freddie quickly clicks off the wedding video the moment the glass situation is under control. And for a very long time, Alana stares at the blank screen, that smile still painfully stapled on. 

 


	3. Wrath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little boy died in the snow (he didn't have a family), a man rotted in a cell (he lost a family). The repercussions of his choices bite with the sharpest teeth, and Alana isn't afraid of him, not in the least. In fact, now, he should be very afraid of her.

Chilton argues until the barely existent bump of Alana Bloom's stomach is too large to ignore, truly, it is, because she is standing there and she leans over to speak quietly in a voice that has made greater men cry, "The microphones and the cameras. Off. I know he's the only one down there. This discussion isn't for your ears, Frederick."

He snaps his laptop lid shut and holds his hands up to fend off the firing squad. She taps the lid, still talking in that voice like a teacher speaking to a student who has ‘overstepped way beyond misbehaving’. "I'll be back right after to check your hard drive, and if there is a single second past right now, 2:12 PM on Saturday, September 2nd, I will spill every indiscretion and misdemeanor I know about you to a board of your superiors."

She's too smart to threaten him with bodily harm, too smart to imply such a thing. He would love to call it her ‘reluctance to violence’, but knows she isn’t afraid to look the devil in the eye and threaten castration. He always remembers she’s been sleeping with the devil for four years, now. However, Chilton houses her devil. Things are going to get _ugly._ Hannibal Lecter’s spawn is steadily growing in her belly. 

"Thank you, Frederick." Her words are a scorpion's sting, and he hates them all the more for their politeness.

* * *

She tells the orderly, Barney Matthews, that surveillance won't be necessary. She's very familiar with the rules of this interaction and Dr. Chilton has agreed to give her undocumented access. Besides, he will be able to hear her down this hall, she tells him. She isn't here for fun. It is both remarkable and piteous to her how the simplicity of a pregnancy seems to be her one-way ticket to everything she wants to accomplish. All she needed to do to undermine Chilton was decide to carry the spawn of Lucifer himself. Easy enough, yeah?

"You just be very careful please, Miss. He's a polite man and I've never seen him unkind to anyone who didn't ask for it or treat him less than civil, but--"

"I appreciate your concern, Mr. Matthews, but it's still my husband in that cell. I know him well enough by now to know that careful is a necessity."

To her horror she acclimates to what she is learning of him. How did he kill, who, why? Did he kill for some purpose? No. Hannibal’s too stable and sane for being a fanatic. No symptoms of mental illness that incurs delusions. Not Son of Sam murders. Good old fashioned, fully present, completely premeditated murders, that's what those were. (For awhile the idea turned her stomach, and now she's warmed to it).

But with every step down that hall she grows angrier, angrier, angrier. Until she can taste the bile of her raging vitriol, and he's sitting on that cot against the wall when she arrives, and she's filled to the brim with anger. She's oozing it. They'll have a child, and that child will have been conceived of her mother's fury, will be born in fire like a dragon should be. "Surprise!" she shouts.

His eyes grow wide. She's never seen him off guard this way. But he looks at her immediately with her arms spread and her palms up and the metal chair scrapes loudly against the floor when she flips it around, sits on it backwards with her legs apart, "Happy incarceration, papa Lecter!"

He’s very close to helpless. Good. Let him see what it is he gave up. And for what? She would die to know. She wants to crack his skull open and pull out every chunk of brain matter, to lay his life out before her like, oh, like one of his tableaux. There's this terrible smile on her face. It looks like broken piano keys smashed on with rattling fists. It looks like it would produce such an ugly sound. It really does.

"Come closer. Right here. Like we used to. Telling secrets, Hannibal." She cranes her neck and rests her forehead against the cool glass, which is very chilly in this cold basement. Her hand is up next, her palm, and he stands in one motion and begins to move forward. He's almost hypnotized, slinking, a disgraced beast. He raises a hand and presses his just on the other side of hers. "I didn't want the privacy room because without this here I could already feel the way my hands itched for your throat."

He's still peering down at her in this enraptured amazement. This horrible daydream he is walking within. He wants to wake in their bed with her mumbling against his spine in the subdued beginnings of a new day. He won't move his hand. 

"I'm raising this kid to be everything you apparently weren't, Hannibal. Thank you for leaving me to do it alone. I was evidently being played by a ruthless psychopath I called a husband with an aesthetic obsession and a narcissistic personality disorder."

He doesn't have words. For anyone else he would bare his teeth, but he's still staring with his breath incredibly steady. She's angry. She's hurt. He knows how she acts when she is hurt. Her eyes rim with red like an animal cornered and she pushes back with all her strength. If she thinks she is so good, she must have forgotten how he does know her, too, his wife on the other side of that glass.

He'd call her rude if she wasn't speaking from a place of bold-faced truth.

"You're forfeiting parental rights. Say it. Out loud. You're going to be saying it a lot whenever people ask you the question."

He stalls. He's quiet, looking at her, and like a spell broken, his hand lowers and falls back to his side so unnoticeably it might it might as well be done with no control. He looks at her with his head tilted through the ashen-grey fringe of his hair. "It is my child as well, Alana."

"No." Her hands are gripping the front of the chair so very tight. "No. I don't care what you have or don't have. I abandoned pity when I discovered what you fed me, Dr. Lecter. I left it behind when I learned how long you'd lied to me. I won't give you a chance to lie to my child. You ruin everything you touch. I refuse to allow you to ruin something within developmental stages. I won't be so blind or so cruel. You forfeit all rights where I am concerned, and future rights—all future rights—where this child comes into discussion. You made your bed, and now you're going to fucking lie in it."

It would be in his nature to fight it. Ordinarily, it would be a part of him to snarl, to bite. This place is making him uglier. It's been only a few days and he's already degenerating.

Instead, he looks at her coldly and he says, "This responsibility is yours."


	4. Questionable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ability to lose sight of who you are is easy when smoke clouds your vision and you can't see past the tears. Alana Bloom's blurring at the edges, but how do you keep kindness through this brand of pain?

"Did you set out with the intention of breaking me?"

He's watching her with contempt. His hands are folded politely atop the table—he's slipping and she sees it. He would never look at her with quiet, unmasked dislike. It doesn't matter, of course, because only Alana Bloom can be largely pregnant and still truly frightening. He tries to settle his discomfort into a quiet apathy; it works, somewhat.

"You aren't broken," He will regret saying this when Alana tells him he doesn’t have the authority to presume anything of her at all, "you may be going through a trial, but you are not broken."

"As if you know a thing about me. And why _not_ me?"

He knows her so well he hums approval in the back of his throat, inaudible. Her palm is on the table and she's moving it about calmly, as though she's gesturing to something, but the gesture is mere anxiety, or perhaps searching with her hands for something she can’t quite name. "You don't have a pattern. There's no order or link to what we've found. Those art-pieces indicate a disturbed way of thinking that would lean toward obsessive but you've hidden your psychosis so well I cannot diagnose it. You swept an entire personality under the rug. Normal couples would have hid parking tickets."

The joke goes completely ignored.

"I've nothing to hide. The personality you refer to in 'my crimes' is the same personality you experienced every day of our merged life, Alana—"

"—Doctor Bloom," she corrects. The sound of her first name out of his mouth cuts her deeper than any blade–…she banishes the thought. "Your not answering why I hadn't been a victim fails to reassure me that it was never an option."

"They say you carry girls quite highly and boys quite lowly. A useless wives' tale," he flicks his chin indicatively toward her. He will never point, but the gesture is there, "You’re having a girl, aren’t you?”

"Remember that bit about forfeiting all parental rights? I'm extending it to all spousal rights, too."

She doesn't know why she's still doing this. Maybe it alleviates stress, truthfully. Maybe her power in coming down here is the last firm grip she has on her life. She can spook Chilton into turning off the cameras, but he knows that disobeying will bring down the heavens. Everyone is in Alana Bloom's pocket. She acknowledges a bud of pleasure that has begun to grow from verbally kicking Hannibal around. It isn't more than the size of a tick, but it is there.

She shrugs and sits back, her spine as straight as she can manage. "Maybe I'll divorce you."

Her wedding ring is a symbol of survival and adaptation. The absence of his is a symbol of failure. She knows it’s gone—he’s been too careful about not exposing his ring finger. Doe she think its absence will wound her? Or that it’ll make it easier for her to give him up?

She sees an unrestrained flash of panic across his face—or does she? Some old phrase she remembers about 'not shooting until you see the whites of their eyes' rolls across her mind. His are very white, indeed.

Being wrong feels akin to his jaw being wired shut. He can't argue her feelings or plead a case. There is no angle of this scenario where Hannibal has even vague permission to be defensive.  He ducks his head a little, then.

"Do with me what you will.”

She tilts her head to look at him. She certainly isn't imagining the way his mouth drops into the most imperceptible frown. 

* * *

 

"I noticed something curious. It seems there is a total absence of a toilet seat in my husband’s cell.””

She doesn't bother to knock anymore. If Hannibal has decomposed in the dark, Alana has degenerated in broad daylight. She has lost almost all tact when she doesn't see it valuable. She doesn't even change expressions, doesn't go stern or harsh. She just seems uncaring, almost fleeting.

“Would you care to explain the validity of your unsanitary conditions, Dr. Chilton?"

"Dr. Lecter came upon my mail shuffled in with his and violated my privacy, then gave it to me as a gift, stripped into pieces and folded elaborately into what appeared to be a carnation. It warranted severe punitive action, Dr. Bloom, or else he might consider acting in such a flippant way again without proper consequence."

Something inside Alana wants to laugh hysterically. Carnations mean something—everything Hannibal does means something. Carnations mean disappointment in a person. She wonders what the mail was, and does hope so hard it was a rejection letter.

"Then remove his books or drawings, Dr. Chilton. There's no behavior that warrants stripping the basic human right of  a toilet seat. Put it back."

Chilton replaces his silver pen down on the desk. He feels calm even though he knows he shouldn’t.

"And what'll you do for me, Dr. Bloom?"

He's tried this only twice before. Using Hannibal as leverage has not worked. He doesn't know how one person can be in equal measure so cruel and so kind. Alana wants to both destroy Hannibal's life and assure it is in tact. The feelings are somewhat conflicting.

"I won't notify your superiors about your unethical behavior toward some of your inmates, and I _certainly_ won't tell them my potential theory that you have been illegally sedating my husband in an attempt to extort information for your own benefit." Her tone never fluctuates, but perhaps that is the most frightening thing of all.

"I have never _\--"_

"Sure you haven't. Put the toilet seat back, Frederick, and learn how to color inside the lines. Not everyone is at-ease with the unorthodox product. I would think you marginally better than inhumane." 

* * *

Freddie knows Alana's kitchen better than Alana knows her own kitchen. This is not unsurprising since she also does not know her own kitchen as well as her husband does— as well as her husband _did._ She sits at the small table nearby the counter and pays attention. Freddie's vegetarian ways have become useful since Alana can no longer stomach meat. The very concept of it turns her insides to mulch, and she will take morning sickness over the prospect of steak any day. Months ago, if she told herself she would cringe at the idea of a cheeseburger, she knows that self would've laughed at her in skeptical disbelief.

"I told him I would divorce him."

Freddie doesn't even pause at the pasta. She keeps Freddie around for precisely this reason. Nonplussed and focused too intently on sauce, Alana could confess murder and Freddie would not bat an eyelash. She may click the button on her tape recorder (which is in Alana's left hand), but she will not balk.

"And what made you feel compelled to deal such a harsh blow?”

"I wanted to see what he would do," Alana shrugs, sounding detached, remotely flat. She won’t stop staring at her hands.

"That's intensely sociopathic of you."

"But not of him," Alana ignores the statement altogether, brushing it off.

Freddie doesn't sprinkle spices, she dumps them. Nothing about her movements is delicate. Freddie is bombastic in every sense of the word. Sometimes, Alana notices these little things and she feels both endeared and annoyed.

“He became upset. It was a minute reaction, but a sincere one. When I mentioned divorce he seemed hurt. His jaw became very tense and he avoided eye contact.”

"People aren't textbooks, Doctor Bloom," Freddie could sound almost helpful if she wanted to. "They don't exhibit a certain checklist of qualities that allows you to categorize them."

"In this particular condition, if it were psychopathy, he would have no reason to continue feigning emotion. He isn't ever getting out of there and I will never be a serious factor to him again. He will never have to consider me on any genuine level. That emotional reaction was authentic," Alana pauses to take a sip of iced tea, lament beer, and then remind herself she never wants to drink beer again, "There are plenty of tests of that nature. Hare's psychopath checklist, for once. While not entirely accurate, it _is_ a categorizing checklist."

"And an inaccurate one, as you just said… Are you trying to diagnose him?"

"I have no word for what he is," Alana says quietly. She has a hand touching on the swell of her stomach, her palm sure and weightless. "Do you think it's the Xenomorph I'm going to give birth to, like an _Alien_ chest-burster or something?"

"I would more securely put money on the Antichrist. Dr. Lecter may have been Lucifer, but he was never an alien—in literal respects, anyway. To his benefit, figuratively, he was a legal one."

"...If that's marinara sauce again I'm going to cut your hair next time you fall asleep on my couch during a movie."

Freddie stops at the stove and then discreetly tips the pot into the sink, pouring out the steaming contents and watching as they evacuate down the drain. She doesn’t take risks. Alana Bloom’s threats are backed up by nothing but surefire intent. 

“Of course it isn't, Doctor Bloom. How bland and repetitive you must think my culinary talents."


	5. New

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alana's fortunate. Perhaps starting over won't be as hard as she thought. This isn't her old life, her happy one, but maybe the happiness was brittle and she took so much of it that it broke. This new life has a distinct sense of melancholy, but so do the fields in limbo. Maybe it's going to be alright after all.

For weeks at a time, Hannibal waits for mail. Letters and requests from psychiatrists come in, hundreds of questionnaires. Every day he doesn't find a set of divorce papers and every day their absence lets him breathe for the rest of the day. The very next day, he begins the process anew. This is borderline psychological warfare. He walks a tightrope between petty frustration for his emotional state and reluctant pride. The trick is very clever, and even cleverer that after the divorce jibe she hasn't turned up. He keeps careful count of each day. She will not have had that child just yet.

The weeks shuffle by. Pregnancy is complicated and exhaustive and Alana winds up somehow more irritable than her normal self, the one without Lucifer's parasite incubating inside of her. She suffers through ultrasounds with a rotating cast of characters, but to everyone's merit she always has a warm hand to hold (unless it's Freddie's. In which case, she will skip the hand).

She's been in contact with Margot Verger. It is in Alana Bloom's genuine makeup to be concerned, and Margot spent some weeks as Alana's patient before she asked to terminate the relationship after Mason was victim of a freak accident falling into the pen of hogs he raised. The animals ate off a significant three-quarters of his face, and the tumble in has left him paralyzed. Alana will never say she is glad a human being has suffered, but looking at Margot and trying every moment to fortify the heiress's mental stronghold, she is not sad for Mason's disfigurement. Margot suffers enough at Mason's hands. Alana can see it written in all capitals.

She visits Margot and like spring thaws beneath winter snow Alana can pin down a wistful sense to Margot upon the subject of bearing a child. She tells Margot she'd love to be friends, if she would like that, if it would be alright, and Margot promises between them once Alana's allowed to drink she would love to share the Macallan Twelve Year.

 "That might be a little refined for somebody who has a fondness for Warsteiner," Alana smiles in reply, but thinks after her aversion to beer it will be nice to associate alcohol, beverages, anything with pleasant feelings.

She asks Jack Crawford the be the child's godfather. She has two brothers and her two brothers have each other. Jack, Jack is losing Bella to cancer treatments. It's not there yet, but between realistic Bella Crawford and Alana's clear-headed medical degree they both know in time Jack will have no one, not in that way. So Alana will give him someone. She will give him a someone he has always at least vaguely alluded to wanting. When she asks the question he laughs and he smiles and the sound of his thunderous chuckle is a noise she knows this little one will love, too. She's strategically building the pieces as best she can, and when this baby is born the kid will have a family that she's made, one specially created just for her child. Jack Crawford will make a great godfather. To be frank (something she wouldn't say aloud), if anything should happen to her she would trust this little one's life to Jack in a heartbeat.

When she finds out it's a daughter she'll be having it's Beverly in the room with her, who has an easy sense of humor and a witty smile that dispels any unease Alana tends to fall into. It's not until after she stops crying, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth to suppress a twitching smile, the tears falling wordlessly down her cheeks, that she remembers Hannibal's words. She has no plans to tell him whether he has a son or a daughter. He doesn't deserve even that knowledge.

"You gotta name picked out?" Bev asks.

"The girl's middle name will be Mischa. First names I'm still sitting on."

She thanks every universal higher power for a girl, for the middle name. She will give this precious thing armor to wear without even knowing it. Hannibal wouldn't dare touch a human being bearing the name of his sister, who Alana knows died long ago but not a thing else. If she couldn't protect herself as well as she would've liked, she will protect her daughter far better. She will endear the dragon to his daughter. In addition to the narcissism, she will force fondness upon him.

She doesn't think she's become cruel. She has only become what is needed to survive. She lived so many years and didn't see the cage. Granted, it was beautifully furnished, but she never knew what she thought was a man was a monster, and she just had a particular talent for taming.

"Mischa's a pretty name. Sort of uncommon," Beverly pulls into Alana's driveway, humming all the while, "Why go for the middle name first?"

Because she doesn't want to saddle this child with the ghost of a dead aunt Alana knows literally nothing about, not primarily.

"The first name is just eluding me," Alana lies.

 

* * *

 

Freddie gets up from the couch to retrieve the popcorn from the microwave. It's beeping, beeping, and after three beeps she knows Alana will give her the death stare fit to strip the paint from the walls. On the way past, Freddie makes a very bold decision. She bends down, cranes her neck, and lightly pushes her fingers just beneath Alana's chin. Freddie's lips brush hers for but a moment, and she only breaks off when it's understood that the gesture is reciprocated. Freddie just needs to know it's mutual.

When she comes back into the room the air is admittedly so thick she notices it is harder to breathe. Alana looks shell-shocked, shaking in the smallest way. One hand is gripping the large sofa's armrest.

"Why?" Alana asks, "Why did you have to decide to go ahead and fuck everything up?"

"Did I misread?" Freddie inquires, sounding at least fairly genuine for once.

Freddie is not genuine in the least. She is selfish and cares only to know that she has what she wants, and what she wants is to know if this is unrequited. She begins to consider how to repair her own dignity if it's a case of mixed signals.

"I was at least three quarters of the way to not totally reviling you. I had mostly grown to like you. You were smart, occasionally funny. You were very willing to help-- for selfish purposes, as I am beginning to see. But now you have to go and be a _pile of shit."_

Freddie has not prepared for an outcome worse than mixed signals. She hasn't figured this had the potential to turn into something dangerously close to an altercation.

For the first time in a long time Freddie is out of words. This is unexpected. This is unplanned for. She doesn't have a fallback for this, and she thinks lying about the nature of the gesture would earn her a more severe argument than any other. She's learned it is almost impossible to lie to Alana. The woman has this acute detector for any untruths. It's made Freddie very, very cautious.

Jesus, this has been a minefield.

"I don't see how you could rate this as any sort of infidelity, Doctor Bloom--"

" _Stop it. Stop it. Alana._ This is a conversation where you do not call me by my professional title. And do you think I care about the infidelity? I don't. He broke my trust so badly he doesn't deserve my fidelity. Fidelity would be something that stood in a normal marriage, not one where I found out my husband of four years and best friend of many more was a _serial killer and a cannibal_. This has nothing to do with fidelity, and it has everything to do with how fucked up my marriage was."

 "Do I look like a marriage proposal to you?" Freddie's acidic sarcasm slithers in, "I just want to be someone you can count on."

"Get out," Alana says, staring at the floor with such intensity it might burn a hole in the wood, "I don't have the capacity or the time to figure this out right now. I'll call you, Freddie, but right now I think it's important you get out."

 

* * *

 

She weighs six pounds. The little girl's heart-rate worries her doctor, so through the emergency c-section Alana is both the toughest and most difficult patient there is.

Doped up, she's asking questions to the last moment. When she's finally permitted to see the baby in recovery, Jack is there with a fragile-looking but ultimately teary Bella on his arm. Will Graham and Molly both seem bright, her brothers ushering past both to stand at her bedside. Jesse Bloom is a large man with broad shoulders and all three of the Bloom children have the dark hair, though Jesse's is faintly curly. Eddie is the youngest of them, and his eyes, darker blue, express everything he feels. And this is his baby niece, isn't it? He's smiling so big. Somewhere in the back of the room, a discreet click of heels, and Freddie Lounds leans in the doorway.

Not a single soul cares that Katharine Mischa Bloom, born January 9th, blinks up at them with eyes the most distinct shade of russet red.


	6. Relief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life inside four walls that one may never leave is enough to cause twinges of unwelcome loneliness. Hannibal Lecter wonders if memory is truly enough, here at Alana Bloom's mercy, severed from the outside world. Freddie Lounds drifts back in like summer heat squiggling up from pavement and she doesn't know if she still has the conviction for refusal. At least she's got a family, by now, that's enough to hold her steady.

Will Graham visits Hannibal Lecter in spite of himself. Alana won't. He knows Alana won't. There's no stab of warm compassion to her anymore, like a knife slipping through warm butter. It isn't there. It doesn't sit right with Will that Hannibal will have no clue that his child is now out in the world. It doesn't make him feel better about anything. He weighs out if Alana is too scared or too angry to see Hannibal. The answer is 'too angry'.

"You have a child," Will says, his jaw rigid, "I came here to tell you that much, at least. You have a child."

"And do I have a son or a daughter, Will? Is Alana alright?"

"It's in bad form, Hannibal, to ask for your wife's health as an afterthought. Though I'd say it is a little fucking late for you to even have the right to care," Will focuses on him over the rims of his glasses, his brow casting a heavy shadow over his blue eyes, "I'm not telling you what it is. You won't get that out of me. You're lucky enough I'm even telling you there's a child. It felt indecent to the kid not to, at least. I don't rightly care how you feel about it."

Hannibal is rigid on the cot, his spine straight as a board. He stares past Will as though there are better things behind him. Hannibal's left hand is very nearly tucked beneath his thigh, and he moves to scoot his right one to join its partner beneath his other leg. It's the ring finger on his left hand, however, Will sees immediately he is taking pains to hide.

"I appreciate the information, no matter how lacking it is in full disclosure. Thank you very much, Will."

"I'm not doing it for you. I could give a shit less about you. Telling you to burn in hell is redundant. You've found hell alright, yourself. And if you think I can't hear the way you're trying to get me to use pronouns for this kid to slip up on you, Hannibal, I'm disappointed at how stupid you must think I am. Maybe Chilton, in his infinite sympathy, will share a fatherly cigar with you, monster."

Hannibal's expression remains solid, plainly somewhere between blank and calm. He lazily shifts his eyes to Will's, which causes the man to immediately look away. 

"Thank you again for your consideration, Will," Hannibal says, and Will can swear he's grinding the formality through the smallest spaces between his teeth.

* * *

 

The seasons come and they go and it's barely four months and TattleCrime is conspicuously barren and Alana is thinking about it almost regularly. Katharine is an enigmatic child the way Alana almost figures she should've expected. She doesn't cry often and her motor skills are very well-developed, but she throws tantrums over what she doesn't want like a tempest. It leaves Alana shoving the heels of her hands into her eyes for long moments before she has to breathe, start again. Begin her thought process anew. She masters the art of not exploding. She's a baby. Babies are frustrating.

Beverly is her lord and savior in this case. Beverly has the patience of a saint and she smiles gleefully at the little one, who makes inquisitive movements, is reluctant to laugh. This worries Alana, the way every ounce of development does. She's never seen Beverly so happy, nose-to-nose and cooing with little Katharine. When the girl finally does laugh, the sound is a squeaky little shriek.

"You're good," Alana whispers, tilting her head toward the sleeping babe slouched against Beverly Katz.  

"Three sisters and two brothers, all younger. I've had practice," Beverly winks and grins, touching softly at the thickening wisps of black hair beginning to overtake Katharine's head, "you better watch it. She's gonna be a smart cookie."

Those russet eyes have altered to accents of chestnut brown, but the dark crimson is distinct. Alana wishes she wouldn't have inherited that from her Papa, but she knows she was stupid to think anything else would've happened. She would've been much more at-ease peering back at reflections of her own baby blues. Another item to add to the shit-list, she figures, but she feels far less burdened when she reads a book and those intent red eyes transfix on her.

Astute and surprisingly capable, Alana notices that the little girl has learned quicker than most that certain actions will goad from her reactions. For example, the baby has learned that if she throws a stuffed toy at Mama's head it'll startle her, which will result in Mama smacking it away with a distressed sound, which will elicit small bursts of glee from the babe in burbling laughs. She isn't terribly vocal (save for moments of screaming displeasure) but she's clever and getting cleverer by the day. All children develop in their own time, Alana reminds herself repeatedly.

* * *

 

It's the cusp of July threatening to roll over to August. The heat is only getting hotter when Alana's doorbell rings, and she's slow to answer for a moment because everyone (and by 'everyone' she means her little circle) usually knocks. The doorbell's woken Katharine more than once. The phrase 'sleeps like a baby' doesn't really apply to her kid.

She opens the door with the small set of her house keys poking out from between her fingers, fisted behind her back. An old and useful trick for immediate weaponry if necessary.

But it's Freddie Lounds there. No bag to speak of, nothing but a little plaid blazer and a charming dress just beneath it, expectantly as short as it can be. She smiles and Alana smiles back. Alana hates, hates, hates that she returns Freddie's expression, because it isn't a minute before Freddie's kind little smile quirks to an arrogant smirk.

"Are you still angry with me?"

"I can't get angry with you. In this case, it's like getting mad at the cat for trying to eat the canary. Take that analogy however you like," Alana spies nothing on Freddie's person. Truthfully, not even her cell phone. Just the miniature slip of a plastic card-keeper in the blazer's breast pocket. An iPhone on a dress that tight would make an awkwardly noticeable shape in her bra. Alana looks, and Freddie crosses her arms over her chest, still smug. "Nice of you to show up again. Making the most of philandering, I figure?"

"You said, I very specifically remember, _'I'll_ call _you'_. Those were your exact words when you ushered me so rudely out of your house."

"Do you have the footage to prove it?" Alana asks, half a test, half a joke.

"I don't tape our visits, Dr. Bloom. That would be insincere of me. And I wasn't philandering. Abigail and I were book-touring," Freddie's voice hits a softer note when she says Abigail's name. Alana finally beckons her in, and wonders what the hell to do from there.

Frankly, she isn't enjoying how unnatural this feels.

"I hope you were a well-behaved parasite," Alana means it, her tone bordering on scolding. She loves Abigail Hobbs. Before what Alana refers to as 'the fuck up', she and Hannibal were another set of parents for Abigail, an addition to Freddie's strangely maternal attitude toward the trauma victim. Alana counseled her for a long time.

Alana always remembers most vividly when she accidentally called Abigail 'Abby', an instinct of Alana's to feel for personal attachment. Abigail's entire face seemed to scrunch up in despairing resentment and she shook her head, looking almost a little ill, and punctuated it with a grimace. Abigail tried to retort with 'Lana' which only succeeded in a small, irritated smile from Alana. Only her brothers called her that.

"Well, where is the devil's spawn? Surely you haven't sacrificed her yet."

"Even the antichrist has a nap time. But that is really enough of that from you. I'm allowed. I'm her mother."

Alana's retreating to the kitchen in the bowels of the house, Freddie following abruptly after. She's missed these overdramatic walls, these ceilings. Alana's been subtly changing the color coordination over time, and now the solid motif running through the home is a filigree like a gilded vein and a lot of deep blue. It could be warm in a cold sort of way, and Freddie asks herself if this child will grow surrounded by the finer cultural appreciations Hannibal has always represented or Alana's strangely down to earth reconciliation of society and ordinary life. It doesn't feel like Hannibal's home anymore. This feels very much like a place that is Alana Bloom's. 

"You finally took to the 'mother' thing. It must have taken you months to settle. I suppose with the tangible proof it's gotten easier," Alana spent months into pregnancy up until practically labor refusing to refer to herself as a 'mother' or anything remotely maternal. She said it felt strange, but now there is an ease to it.

"I have more than enough proof. I can't ever wear a bikini again without showing off my scar. Makes motherhood easier when you've been branded by it," Alana turns to the age-old task of making coffee, patiently preparing Freddie's as though nothing's changed.

She's almost panicking with it. Nothing's changed. She doesn't feel remotely abandoned at all, hasn't put down Katharine to sleep and overthought Freddie's presence in the recovery room after having her while Alana was thoroughly medicated. Absolutely not, there is no way Alana has noted Freddie's sudden absence right after that. Like Freddie saw the results and felt she could just walk away.  

There is no bitterness to Alana Bloom, no sir. She does not feel at all like she is so broken one monster loved her and now so shattered that another breed of manipulative beast could easily just walk out of her life. She does not know the meaning of 'bitter' but for her beer preferences. Absolutely not.

"Who have you entrusted to babysit the little animal?"

"Beverly, mostly. Will and Molly. Jack says she's almost good for Bella. She can be a little much for Jimmy and Brian. My brothers have flown out when they can to visit. Margot Verger likes her very much, but I don't think she's up to that task."

"And I suppose you planned to never call me again?"

"I've been a little busy," Alana's teeth grit and she pours a spoonful of sugar into Freddie's coffee, another, one more. Three sugars, milk, until it maintains a vague shade of light caramel color, "I really don't need this if you're gonna make everything harder, Freddie. I really, really don't."

"Did I bring that up?" Freddie sounds innocent, the 'did I do that?' tone, but in its sudden height of pitch it's just shrill and patronizing, "and does this exempt you from etiquette or being considerate? Come now, Alana. I expected more of you."

"I don't need the complication, Freddie, and I swear to you if I have to bring that up one more time--"

It's a hand on Alana's shoulder that freezes her. She thinks it's how she hasn't been touched in too long a while. It takes all of Alana’s constitution not to crumble against it. She's been somehow off limits to everyone, so much so that even her brothers have given her the hesitant treatment. Freddie has never been shy to the physicality of things, though Alana can read her like a book. Actual intimacy for Freddie Lounds must be taboo.

"I just want to help," Freddie says, very calm to temper Alana's attitude, "there is nothing to bring up. And I think you're over complicating things for yourself."

"What the fuck do you know about parenting, Freddie?"

"Nothing. I know literally, absolutely nothing. But I am well aware that there is no way you can manage without."

"Without _you?"_

"Stop," Freddie murmurs, gaze lowering, and when Alana tries to jerk away she keeps her grip, hangs on, "yes. I am interested in you. Is that what you wanted to hear? Allow me to feed your narcissism.”

Alana breathes out for a moment, deep, very long, and something miraculous happens: she chooses logic over an explosive reaction (though it is largely because, for once, Katharine is still sound asleep and the doorbell has even gone off).

“I’m sorry,” she sighs, holds her hands up, “okay. I apologize. Thank you for remembering that I exist. At least, I appreciate that.” 

“I assume the worst of everything is over. You may _breathe,”_ Perhaps Alana knows she should stop Freddie, but there’s a series of events occurring in her brain that forces her not to. It’s the general goddamned way Freddie touches her, reaches for her hand, eases the pad of her thumb across Alana’s knuckles, and how she falls to pieces for the tenderness of the gesture _(it_ _’_ _s manipulative, she knows it is manipulative, but Alana has chosen to ignore it completely. She has become too worn-down to do anything but ignore it and how sad it is to be so suspicious of kindness. It disgusts her a bit, to know that she_ _’_ _s become someone who questions this)._

"Yeah," Alana agrees. She won't say a single word about how Freddie was missed.

But oh, she hasn't felt loved in so long. 


	7. Adaptation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dust has been kicked up, flying around for quite some time, but now it's beginning to settle. Katharine Mischa Bloom becomes a fine centerpiece for the crew, and Alana takes to the role of caregiver with a less than prominent ease. But there are secrets in the dark she demands must be hauled into the light, and these days when Alana makes demands most everybody listens.

"Freddie Lounds?"

"Freddie Lounds," Alana says, clutching her cup of tea like a lifeline. She seems more like she's announced the date of her own execution, "she's babysitting my daughter right now."

"You trust that woman with Katharine?" Beverly's vision feels fuzzy around the edges. It's the way she has to breathe deep and take it in, this astonishing information, and learn to deal with this. Is Freddie Lounds going to become a staple of her personal life? That's a scary thought.

"She's very good with kids. Astonishingly. Freddie has... good traits," Alana stops, shaking her head with an expression like she's just eaten the world's hottest pepper, "I think saying that burned a hole in my throat."

"Well is she good in bed, at least?" Beverly jokes, hides her grin behind an accidental mustache of cappuccino foam.

"I wouldn't know. I haven't slept with her."

Beverly's expression is faltering, a little wary. This discussion is sounding suspiciously like real romantic attachment, and she actively doesn't think Alana's heart can handle another crippling blow.

"So should I call this serious?"

Alana cracks a smile that hurts Beverly. Around the edges it spiders out, and she hasn't smiled in a real way in a long time. They're all sardonic, faked and pained, forced for the ease of someone else. Bev wishes there was something she could do, but she isn't the psychiatrist that Alana is, and she's far from being the healer.

"I wish I really knew. I wouldn't say it was serious. I'm not dying of it. I would say, at least, it's more of an emotional band-aid." If anyone deserves an emotional band-aid, it is Alana Bloom (she legally dropped the Lecter).

"And are you totally sure you can trust her?" Alana leans back. For a minute, she's the old Alana. There's this confidence about her, and when the sun hits her just right and her eyes are the perfect shade of crystal clear you can see why anyone, anyone at all, falls in love with Alana Bloom.

"She loves Katharine. Much more than she intended. Freddie is fonder of children than she likes to admit, I can tell. She won't be as big a snake-in-the-grass as she would be without my daughter involved. I have that trump card."

To have had this kind of mastery in her marriage, Alana laments it now. It took this kind of damage to gain such insight into humanity. Now she sees, she knows, and her scent is as sharp as a bloodhound's. She knows exactly who can be trusted.

"Just be careful, Alana," Beverly leans across the table, drops her head a little. She raises both eyebrows seriously at Alana, who has unexpectedly become one of her closest friends since 'the fuck up,' as it's now referred to in their circle, "I know I don't need to tell you that. Caution's kinda your second nature. But if you're happy, I think we're all happy."

To be honest, Alana at least somewhat thinks her fondness for Freddie is a touch of the old Alana, an ability to put stock in someone who is otherwise damned by all else. And it feels sort of nice to know she hasn't gone completely cold. Somewhere she still has a pulse.

"Don't worry about me," Alana shrugs, and knows Beverly will. It's just in her nature, like caution is in her own. "There's nothing anybody can really do by this point that would be worse than what's already happened."

* * *

 

Katharine's first word is 'puppy', troublingly late, if you ask Alana. It's one day in Will's house as her little fingers grasp for Applesauce's soft fur and she shouts it suddenly. The word gives Alana a small heart attack. She laughs in the kind of relief that bleeds out of her slowly, air escaping her lungs. It's a burden lifted, at least, because the child keeps happily repeating the word to what almost sounds like a jaunty tune. Will smiles brightly and kneels down, Katharine toddling over to push Applesauce into his arms, and she just keeps reminding him, "puppy, puppy!" Alana thinks sometimes she might be getting the hang of things.

She returns to private practice thanks to Freddie's help, feels much more whole taking patients again. It's shocking to know she can still gauge an adult mind. One day she returns from her last patient and Abigail is playing some little game with Katharine, Freddie watching patiently. Alana's practically ecstatic by this point. She did think she was happy before, but she's realizing, now, that maybe there are kinds of happiness. It's possible to be happy in a different way. Perhaps she wasn't letting herself be happy, and that was mainly the problem.

Katharine Mischa Bloom is two verging on three by this point, and Alana has discovered some maddening relationship with Freddie Lounds that she has no real categorization for. She asks questions less, analyzes with less frequency. She still cannot take off her wedding band.

Katharine infuriates her more with each little tantrum. Admittedly, Alana is very quick to anger, and she faults herself endlessly for the short fuse she seems incapable of lengthening for her own daughter. She dulls the sting of resentment at those red eyes, and now it's just that there's this small person refusing to do what she says. Alana is unaccustomed. Everyone has always danced around to reach compromise with her. And she swears it isn't the resentment. Not those high little cheekbones or that same sharp cleverness, a childish yearning for knowledge the way she can easily see Hannibal might have been. Katharine demands stories. Before bedtime, it is Harry Potter.

God, she loves her so much. She wishes these circumstances were so much better. But time goes by and Will says he's eager to teach Katharine to fish. Price and Zeller play indelicate games of Operation with her, and the girl's tiny hands are surprisingly deft at the task. Beverly makes her laugh more than anyone else. Freddie becomes an unusual fixture in the girl's life, and she and Alana fall strangely into place around each other. Neither of Alana's brothers are much for Freddie (Eddie accuses her of 'slutty journalism' to Alana and his sister smacks him upside the head, snapping only for the sake of avoiding hostility if it goes far enough for Freddie to hear), but they come stick around for two weeks in odd snatches of time. Eddie, older, far more the serious one with much better tact, roughly squeezes her shoulder and reminds her to ignore Eddie. Katharine loves them. Each time they visit, it's with armfuls of X-Men comic books and old toys that were her mama's.

Margot is the only one whose hand Katharine will hold. She considers it childish for everyone else, and to Alana's quiet surprise Katharine tells Alana Margot 'seems sad' and her heart skips a couple beats at her daughter's kindness. Abigail warms to her almost immediately, shows her blanket forts, funfetti cupcakes, and when Abigail is with the girl her smile is a little looser, a little less strained.

For all Bella's exhaustion the child makes it almost impossible to tell. Jack takes her on little backyard camping sleepovers and teaches her the constellations. Katharine utters their names into her pillow before she sleeps, and Alana promises to make her bedroom ceiling into the night sky.

Alana's visits with Hannibal are strained and strange. He makes coy jokes about absent divorce papers, smiling, constantly concealing his left ring finger. She wants to pop his head off, but she goes to see him because somewhere, maybe, he has the answers. Maybe he can tell her why he is whatever the hell he is. She waits for him to grow horns, maybe, a forked tongue, a red tail, anything. He never does. Every time she sees him he is dark and sallow, cut from the prisms of a diamond whose shine has dulled.

One day the need to talk to him possesses her. It keeps her up all night. The next morning Freddie slips out of the guest room to Alana fully dressed and making coffee, which is absurd because Freddie keeps early hours. When Alana leaves, telling Freddie she'll be back in an hour, Freddie has to hold her tongue with great difficulty.

* * *

"Was I ever in love with you? Did I choose it?"

She asks him through clenched teeth. They're set on edge, and she's sitting there in that frigid folding chair in the drafty corridor of cells that has become her second home. They've moved all Hannibal's neighbors out. He's gained a tendency for playing with his fellow men in crueler moments. He convinced one through some sort of technique that he could only communicate in Swahili, and though he was shouting repeatedly in profane English the man had to be sedated as he panicked that the world could no longer understand him. Eventually it became clear to Chilton that Hannibal couldn't be trusted in proximity with delicate minds. They all had to be moved.

"That isn't the question you want to ask me," he doesn't face her, his back turned, sleek and dark like a mink and laid out across the cot. His hands are pressed beneath his body. He looks angular, close to skeletal. Hannibal has lost enough weight that it borders on frightening.

"I don't want to know the answer?"

"No," he says, clicking his tongue, "the question you want to ask is if I ever loved you. You know well you loved me. To you, Dovana, love is second-nature, afforded easily. _Agape_ is the form of love you express because it doesn't concern you. You love with god's ease, and no benefit to yourself. Of course you loved me."

She goes to speak again before he cuts in quick, slicing through her words, "How is Miss Lounds?"

"Fine. When did you care about Freddie?" She asks, treading lightly. It would be wrong to get Freddie killed on her behalf. She curses it, the way she feels guilty about something that will likely never happen. Alana Bloom's best occupation is somehow attributing all fault to herself.

She always used to say 'Freddie Lounds' whenever referring to the journalist. Hannibal takes that note of familiarity, stores it away for assessment. "I don't suppose I could fault you. Affection is a large part of your coping process. You heal tremendously through _Eros_ , therefore the decision is only natural--"

"Are you fucking done avoiding the subject with this college level Greek lesson?" She doesn't raise her voice, though it wavers. Glances up, steals a look dead into the security camera, like a warning. If Chilton defies her she'll strip him bare for all his superiors to see, expose all his secrets. Make clear the wedding video torments and the inhumane punishments he enjoys inflicting on her husband. Maybe she's gone a little insane, herself, or maybe she's turned to stone and never noticed the hardening of her own skin.

"Ask me the question," he turns then, a little halfway, passively glancing at her. She swears his eyes are puce now, where once she remembers they were ruby.

"Were you in love with me?" She's disarmed suddenly. For a moment she feels like it's midnight and Cinderella has turned back into something she wasn't before, into her real self, exposed, a raw nerve of a thing.

"Are," he corrects, like cordial conversation, "ask me 'are', please."

She's staring and she knows. Her eyes burn. She just says, "Are?"

"Yes," how's the weather? So simple, such a breezy admission, "yes. I very much am. And was. And have been. Do you think monsters cannot love? You would be sorely mistaken to assume my affection was ever disingenuous, now or before. I'm a man of extravagant tastes. I never would've chosen someone who wasn't my equal or my better. You should hold yourself in the highest esteem. I chose you because I loved you. You have become my better."

"You don't know what love is," she's suddenly lost her wrath, her courage, "you talk about loving someone like the person that you love is an idea, like they're a doll in a glass case. And that's why you don't know what love is. It isn't because you're a monster, it's because you can't look deep enough into somebody else to see the real reasons you fall in love. Your empathy is shot."

She feels a wave of sudden, sickening nausea. His empathy is shot. More than a decade of friendship (it's dying in her ears now, her own voice, _'your empathy is shot'_ ). The most significant relationship of her life. Glasses of wine until two am and shared records he didn't even like, not really, until she spoke of them and he conceded with what she thought was a quiet love of passion. But can someone masquerading empathy still experience that? Her skin prickles, and she doesn't know if she's hot or cold.

"Alana?" He asks after what feels like an eternity. There is real concern on his face.

"You have no real idea how to love someone," she quickly smooths her palm across her face, her cheek, passes it over her forehead. She settles then for leaning it against her cheek, her elbow on her thigh as she does so, "you can't. You don't know how."

"I do," he says, sounding somewhat annoyed.

She stares at him, long and hard, silent, analytical. And then it dawns on her to ask herself if he could love a little daughter with his very own red eyes staring back at him.


	8. Puppetry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alana Bloom has changed the state of nearly her entire personality, but there are some things she'll never shed. Now to see her one must crane their neck, head tilted, curiously peer past the veneer of black smoke she seems to be becoming. Hannibal meets his daughter for the first time, steeped in indignity. Freddie plays at a balancing act. Will Graham has become the one axis of true peace.

Katharine is five when she goes on her first fishing trip with Uncle Will. Alana, Katharine, Will, and Molly are the ones who go out to buy a change of wardrobe just for the occasion. She insists on a miniaturized version of his fishing gear, so there's a pair of waders in Will's same army green (Alana swore she would never spoil this child, but she likes the tan Burberry fishing hat so much, the woman caves for its pearl pink plaid underside). It feels beyond relieving to be able to go out in public again, though Alana still receives lingering looks. She lives in the honest to god fear that someone will try to take out something against Hannibal on Katharine and if that happens Alana is very sure she will be incarcerated for murder as well.

"You be good, okay?" Alana says, half-knelt to kiss her little girl on the forehead. Katharine's hair is thick, now, has the same faint wave to it her own does, and its the shade of black her hair and her mother's before her was. Her eyes are sharp, chestnut inlaid mahogany. Much to Alana's relief, her classmates think it's 'cool'. She thanks her brothers for that one. In X-Men, Gambit's eyes are red, too. Thank god for Uncle Eddie's comic books. "Listen to Uncle Will. Fishing is a really specific process that I know absolutely nothing about. So maybe if you learn enough you can teach me?"

"Maybe," Katharine replies, with the smoothest sort-of indifference a five-year old can muster.

Will cracks a little smile that contains just a twinge of sympathetic pain-- _this kid's too young to being going through the rebelling-against-mom phase--_ and cocks his head toward his own home.

"C'mon, kiddo," Will says, and Katharine hops to follow like an obedient duckling.

* * *

 

"Why don't I have a papa?"

Will is casting out the lure right as she says this. It lands with a 'plonk' in the stream and he freezes briefly. Katharine is gazing off at her own line, the child-sized pole gripped tight in her little, delicate hands. There's just the sound of water, then, and of Will collecting his thoughts. He doesn't panic, but he has to gather. From the sound of her voice she's never asked her Mother this question before.

Before this Alana had spoken to all of them (they've become Alana's own PTA) about how this is going to be handled. It made Beverly laugh, really, like some kind of business conference. The lot of them all spread across Alana's couches. This odd cast of characters, glasses of wine in most of their hands, and her telling them in the surest voice Will has ever heard her use that they will not poison her toward the concept of her father. If questions come up (and Alana knows they will), they will make it explicitly clear that yes, her father is imprisoned and has done bad things, but in no way does any of her father's situation fall upon her. Katharine is to understand that Hannibal loves her (Will can bring it up clear as day, the way Alana's voice caught in her throat at that, like it hurt) and he would never hurt her. When she's old enough, she can make her own decisions about him knowing none of them forced her hand.

Jack Crawford was the one who had disagreed the loudest, and it was maybe the only time Will has ever seen Alana become truly sharp with him. "Well, Jack, this is my daughter and my situation and I'm the one at the steering wheel," she had said, immovable. No matter how much Jack didn’t agree, he knew not to push.

“A lot of people don’t really have a papa, Katharine. I don’t have a mama, and I didn’t when I was your age, either,”It comes easily, now, or it has after so many years of therapy, of understanding. Will Graham has all kinds of abandonment issues, but few of them become direct correlations to his mother, anymore.

Katharine takes a moment, a look of unrestrained concern crossing her face. She’s too young to understand the premise of someone not having a _mama._ She has one, that’s all she knows, and imagining that Will did not makes her feel stricken, suddenly worried. Who read him Harry Potter when he was young? Whose bed did he sleep in? Who reached the things he couldn’t get to on the top shelf? She’s never had a papa. She can’t even call to mind what one would be like. One day, she will suppose a papa is, perhaps, like Uncle Will.

"Who did the mama things with you?" She asks, and he cracks a smile. A little bitter. Mostly, he just doesn't want this girl to feel abandonment. Not how he grew up. He wants her to know it doesn't necessarily have to be the way it's 'supposed' to. He wants her to know this can be different, and still be happy.

"Who does the papa things with you?" He asks, knows she learns best inside her own understanding.

"Mama," she answers, matter-of-fact, sounding remotely haughty as though the answer is stupid to have to say, "but why don't I have a papa? No one will tell me."

Will reels in his line for no reason but something to do, listening to the thin twine whirr. He finds a fishing line comforting always. He calls upon it and it comes back, forever trapped inside that little reel. It takes skill and mastery to get it just right without knots, entanglements, not to mention too fast you risk the danger of mighty friction. When it returns he casts it out, names the bait for his own Papa in that moment. Ethan Graham was a good man.

"When your papa was very young, I think someone hurt him. Very badly, in fact, in his head. I think they hurt him so bad inside there, inside his head, and his heart, too, he could never understand how to stop hurting things. I don't know if he was born a particular way, but I think something made it happen. So as he grew up he kept hurting people because it was what he knew how to do. He can't be with you because he did bad things and he has to be kept away so he doesn't hurt anyone else. But he loves you, do you know that? He would never ever hurt you, and he loves you more than anyone," it's a miracle, Will will tell her one day, a goddamn miracle how much he loves her.

Katharine looks up at Will, her eyes alarmingly her father's in that second. She has a steady hold on the little fishing pole, trying to half concentrate, hoping desperately for a tug.

"He hurt Mama really bad, didn't he?"

"Yes," Will isn't about to lie here, "he made it so that it's very hard for her to trust or love anyone else. He hurt your Mama in her heart."

"She loves you, Uncle Will," Katharine responds, tugging her own line stubbornly, "and Aunt Freddie. Uncle Jack and Aunt Bella, Aunt Margot. Uncle Eddie and Uncle Jesse she loves the most. Uncle Jimmy and uncle Brian, even though sometimes they're both stupid--"

Will takes a moment when Katharine says Alana loves him, smiling all too suddenly in that vaguely grimacing way of his. For a moment it means more to him than anyone can know. Alana Bloom, if she can still love at all, to know she loves him.

"--stupid isn't a nice word," Will says, softly as a wave, "so we don't use it, alright?"

"Mama says it."

"Well then you're just gonna have to yell at her for it, aren't you?"

It's hard to explain to a five-year-old that love is different in all cases, comes in many forms and many feelings and many ways. It's hard for a little girl to understand what 'isn't enough' when enough for a child is so much simpler.

He doesn't think Alana will ever love anyone the way she has loved Hannibal Lecter. More to the point, the way that Will knows she still does love him.

Will reels in a largemouth bass when it bites. Katharine asks him all about it, the conversation of moments ago temporarily taking a backseat. There, in the quiet of the stream, he's at least happy to have someone to share this with.

* * *

 

"I'm taking her to meet her father."

Freddie stops in the middle of the eggs, the milk, and the cream, suddenly very occupied with thoughts that are not quiche. Alana reads this because she puts the ingredients down and places both her hands flat on the counter, her gaze trained solely on Alana. Like most days, Alana braces herself to be 'the bad guy'. It's just the shape her life has seemed to take.

"I really think that's an ill-advised idea," Freddie says, and the rabbity way her nose twitches for just a quick second, Alana knows she's angry.

"Well I'm glad only one of the people in this kitchen happen to be her parent so it's that one-- me, namely-- who decides what goes," Alana brushes by like winter wind, removing the biscuits from the oven. With her back turned, she can't see the largely round shape Freddie's eyes have taken on, a sort of disbelieving hurt annoyance.

"What about this seems like normalcy to you?"

"I would rather she see him. The questions keep piling up, and the longer I relay them while trying to maintain an image, the longer I wait until she hates me for it. She's young, she won't look at him the same way she would if she was older. This is a safer idea. She'll have no reason to resent me when she grows up," Alana's words are rational, but they walk an emotional tightrope. When did these become her circumstances?

"No. You've got something else in mind. I don't know what, but your tune is suddenly very different."

"Please don't make me explain myself," Alana is sick to death of explaining herself, absolutely weary of it. She feels like she spends her life now explaining her machinations to others and it's true, she does. She liked it best when Freddie was unquestioning and helpful. It has inevitably been too long because Freddie is the sort who gets to know someone right down to their bones after long enough.

"What do you think she'll benefit from meeting a man who utterly deceived you for an era? Do you think he's suddenly going to change because of her? This isn't like you, Doctor Bloom."

"Freddie," her name is another warning, a little tired, a little agitated, "he'll behave differently. He's a narcissist. He loves any extension of himself. She's got his eyes. She's going to be fine. And he's going to love her."

"You sound burdened by that idea. I don't need to say it, but you know what I could glean."

"It isn't jealousy," Alana, even, is amazed by her own cool, "I'm just trying to figure out what's best, alright? I'm trying to figure all this out. There isn't a handbook for this kind of thing."

* * *

 

"You've gotta be careful with what you're doing, Alana," Will says, and he doesn't look at her when he takes a pull of his whiskey, neat, just stares up at the big, beautiful moon, "if you don't keep something in the center of the lens you're going to lose focus. You're slipping."

Alana doesn't respond. She thanks Will with a lingering squeeze to the shoulder and wordlessly drifts inside to collect Katharine, who is asleep on a pile of puppies. For a minute, Alana feels like gravity pulls her back to earth. She has a focal point.

* * *

 

The indignity of it is the fact that his child will see him for the first time and it won't be in a suit. Not the way a Count should be, not clothed in cashmere and silk, trimmed in wool and accents of satin. No. Velcro shoes and this material that grates on his skin, this horrible, boring blue. Not the slightest touch of pride but his straight spine and those nimble, soft hands. The small, rubbery touch of tissue on his left where his sixth finger once was is all he has, and that can hardly be considered a hard-won scar. His torso bears the collective of his murmured wounds, the old, faded things they are.

He tries to stand immediately when she walks in but the cuffs at his wrists make a metallic tug, forcing him to lurch back into his seat. The sound is a little like Wolverine's claws coming out, _snikt,_ in the X-Men comics Eddie's passed on to be read to Katherine in funnily imitated voices. In this room, the sound isn't funny.

The child is so very small, Alana's hands sure on her shoulders, and she's peering up at him with wide, almost-almond shaped eyes that are the same pronounced red as his own (though hers keep touches of chestnut somewhere in there). Her hair twists over her shoulder, a thick, tangling serpent, coiled and dark. She's pale and tiny, a beauty mark riding very high at the top-most point of her cheekbone. Thin and sinewy like him. His heart sits inside his mouth when he asks, "Are you a princess?"

The little girl fidgets and Alana softly takes her hand to move across the table, taking the seat. The child climbs into her lap, half sprawled at the top to peer at Hannibal under thick tufts of hair. She smiles, but she'll still away from him, fidget, away, away.

"No, Papa," that voice begins, "I'm a dragon."

"How coincidental." He catches Alana's eye for a minute, reading her, looking for approval. He sees it, the bare minimum, "I am a dragon prince. And you must be a princess, then. You are both, Dovanėlė."

Alana has to swallow when that word comes out of his mouth. _How beautiful you are, Dovana_ _ė_ _l_ _ė_ _._ His only word spoken in his mother tongue. A secret shared. She stoops to speak into the girl's ear, "Do you want to tell Papa your name since you're only just meeting? It's polite."

She raises her eyes and holds out a little hand-- long fingers, Hannibal thinks, piano fingers-- and has to lean and reach over knelt in her mother's lap so he can shake. He does, and he bends his head there, hair long and dark and the coldest grey of winter's bone, and lightly kisses the child's knuckles. She makes a face, nose scrunched, almost laughing, "Katharine Mischa Bloom is my name. What's yours, before Papa?"

If the middle name hits him, one would never know. He's a flash of small, sharp teeth when he lets her hand go. "Count Hannibal Vilhelmas Lecter, the eighth of my name. You are the first of yours."

She drops back to Alana's lap hard enough that Alana makes a small 'oof' and rests an arm around her in a protective little embrace. Or like a small-child football. Both are vaguely similar concepts, "There were certainly a lot of Hannibals before him. Only one of you."

"He's Papa, though. That's not his name."

Hannibal's watching her, looking for signs of him. He finds Alana's bull-headed nature, her stubbornness. The way the girl will hoard his name like treasure but not acquiesce to it. It wouldn't be polite (he appreciates that). He tries to find the way he hums when he thinks, or touches of his flippant, easy nature.

He feels something like disappointment when he sees only Alana in her.

* * *

 

When his time for talking has ended the child practically claws across the table and pecks him carefully on the cheek, a little touch of affection like something scarcely given, like it is a very small gift. He thinks about it (how fitting) and thanks her with a voice that would be rich if it were anything but empty.

"That's what you do, when you say goodbye," Katharine says, like it is insistent, like it is law.


	9. Birdlime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal and Alana's power-play has become a conscious thing, practically tangible, now. Back and forth, it's a game with no real end-result or benefit, but somehow Alana feels infinitely more relieved for causing him the grief. Margot Verger is grateful for her involvement (it's so nice, she thinks, love without hate). Freddie Lounds can only diffuse so much. The rest of the way it's up to Alana, and that wedding DVD doesn't help anyone.

"To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Doctor Bloom?"

Jack has Katharine for a couple hours at Alana's request. This is just fine because Jack, Will, and Katharine have gone ice fishing. This is even finer because with Bella Crawford's certain looming death Jack has been holed up more than Alana is comfortable with. She's trying to take things as they come, one at a time, which she isn't very good at. Alana overthinks, and when Bella dies she is taking her little one to that funeral. And then she will have to grapple with the ultimate question mark: death, and how one explains that to a child.

Perhaps this was not the best visit to make with her mind so distracted.

"It's really just a visit, Dr. Lecter." There is no love behind the title, now.

"Your transparencies are showing. That's indecent of you," he paces the cell, a jungle cat in his own right, and for a moment Alana swears she sees a shadow of something across his left ring finger, "If you wanted to lull me into a sense of comfort you should separate your visits more, space them between business and-- mmm, can we call this pleasure?"

He presses his tongue hard against his front teeth, watches her for a single sign of movement. She doesn't even fidget.

"No. Informal and formal would be how I would refer to these. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes. Katharine, she would be an 'informal' visit. However, not so. Because you were curiously up to something in that. To sway my view you have to convince me with kindness. In this game, Doctor Bloom, it's all about security and ease. I must feel relaxed with you, but you manipulate with the clumsy, fumbling hands of a novice."

"Why would I want to manipulate you when you when there's nothing I can gain? In case you didn't notice, you're a little stuck. You don't pose a threat," Alana shrugs, and his eyebrows raise.

"I don't?"

"No. You're behind a glass wall. What do I get out of playing around with you when you can't assert anything I would change? I mean, isn't the point of manipulation to get something actively out of it?"

She's so calm it's chilling. Sits back, uncrosses and crosses her legs in a languid motion. Her scent is changing. She smells predatory, now, and once he called her his better. That wasn't true. He thinks she's becoming it, now, something to surpass him, a student who didn't know she was learning at all.

"No," he says, his voice smooth as the blade of a harpy, "it's about illusion. It's about control."

* * *

 

 

Katharine starts with the pony. It's a beautiful little animal, the same color as warm butterscotch with a blonde mane braided by Margot's deft hands. The horse begrudges Katharine only with whinnying shakes of her head. Margot chooses one who will tolerate how the little girl can sometimes dig her heels in too hard. Her name is Caramel for the smooth shade of her pelt, and the pony has a gentle, easygoing disposition.

Alana takes to horseback riding with a bit of a recklessness Margot couldn't have predicted. She chooses a large, white stallion with a difficult temperament who has been known to stop on walks and refuse to move forward no matter the insistence of a prodding foot. Animals take well to Alana and always have. The great beast's name is Silverback ("Like a gorilla!" Katharine adds, who insists on learning about a hundred borderline useless things, and two weeks ago it had been an intense study of primates) because the sun reflects his color somewhat like a vibrant grey.

"I want to ride a real horse," Katharine declares. She sounds so very serious that Alana can't help but laugh a little, making an immediate effort to smother the sound. Too late. She earns a glare from her daughter.

"I'll make you a deal," Margot says patiently, resting a hand on Caramel's hide where Katharine is fidgeting, "I'm gonna let that go, because you hurt her feelings about being a real horse. But you can ride a grownup horse only if it's with your Mama or I."

"You," Katharine agrees, back straight. Her hair is thick and braided still from the morning, dark and sleek down her back like an oil spill.

Alana figures only logically that, as the child's mother, she is logically the 'uncoolest' and how 'cool' Margot must be. She can remember what it was to be that age. Margot, who is pretty and somehow effortless, with horses and excellent taste in clothes and knowledge of so many things.  

Alana will never tell Margot that Katharine has developed an utter soft spot for her, the kind of sympathetic warmth only children can truly cultivate and mean.

"Fair enough, little dragon," Margot helps Katharine out of the saddle, careful not to overdo it. Caramel stamps her foot, Alana swears in relief.

"You've been doing this a very long time, haven't you? You didn't really talk much about it," Alana feels like she's discussing another life, a whole other universe between them. Once this young woman sat on her couch with a tight hold on her own secrets and now there's something to this, something to being out in the open. Margot easily swings up into the saddle, settles behind Katharine who's pleased as any five year old has ever been. She reaches forward, lightly touches Katharine's wrists and eases her tiny fingers from where they're bunched in the mare's mane.

"I have. I always loved horses. They're very interesting animals if cared for correctly," the nonsense has stopped since 'Margot has taken up the throne', as Alana calls it. No more orphan escapades. No more tears in martins. And Alana has watched Margot carefully since they became friends, looking for signs of discomfort, seeking out the physical cues of Mason's abuse. She's relieved to find it's stopped since the heir to the Verger fortune has been incapacitated. Laying a finger on Margot would open the floodgates to allow her to harm Mason. Alana isn't stupid (when it isn't a well hidden cannibal-murderer), she's a good judge of character and Margot is an opportunistic survivor. Kindness, however, Margot appreciates and repays in spades. Alana can tell how that works. When someone proves they mean well and _actually_ mean it after all the shit Margot has suffered it must be infinitely relieving, "they develop personalities the same way humans do, exhibit the main personality traits, mostly. Timid, dominant, challenging, and confident are usually the four."

(Everyone does this, everyone Alana knows. Little exposition dumps, because whenever one looks at Katharine during any little explanation the girl is staring quietly, listening like her life depends on it. She'll be smart in school like Alana was, but without the early daydreaming snare.)

“People always think horse brains are as big as walnuts, but they aren’t. You know how big they are? They’re as big as a grapefruit, Aunt Margot. Animals can’t talk how we can. Do you think they think in pictures like people think with letters? Sometimes when Applesauce sleeps her legs twitch like she’s running, so maybe she dreams, do you think she does?”

“One thought at a time,” Alana’s trotting a little circle around the two, trying to keep at bay that pesky maternal pride tickle that’s tumbling across her heart. If you let her, Katharine will talk for hours, just questions, just facts. Alana herself was far quieter when she was small, a bit shyer, and she couldn’t imagine Hannibal was an outspoken little boy, but the product of them both is conversational. Alana encourages this, even if sometimes it’s exhaustive. She knows more about everything in the whole world than she did before becoming a parent, at any rate.

Katharine makes a face. Margot gently digs her heels into the horse, leaning into Katharine’s back a bit to let her understand the proper application of pressure. Alana’s humming, from the sounds of it some old Pearl Jam tune that no one recognizes but her.

“Mama,” Katharine picks up then, without warning, “our horse is faster than yours.”

* * *

 

She makes the mistake again.

Maybe it's the way the beer makes her head fuzzy. Maybe it's the buzz she has going, the kind that's at least partly white noise. Freddie's wineglass is still sitting on the table, its edge smudged in her coral pink lipstick, and Alana leans forward to rub some off onto the pads of her fingers. She examines the color like it's foreign, like it is not one she has become familiar with on the edges of her skin, but she isn't surprised. Nothing feels particularly familiar that way anymore. Suddenly, her heart aches and she's hit by the realization that she's erased him from this house. Too well, yes, because she wants to see his face but she can't imagine it anymore, can't reveal it. Not by the windowsill sprawled as the rain fell. Not at the high-backed chair he took so often as his by the fireplace, a copy of some book bleeding words into his lap, Alana swaying on the floor at his feet to the sounds of The Beatles spinning on the record player. She does know where she can find him. And that's when the mistake happens.

The DVD whirs to life and for the briefest second a stray autumn lock of someone's hair flickers across the lens and then disappears, leaving the sky in view with its marshmallow clouds. It would rain just as they ducked into the Rolls Royce, and Alana would be exploding in a giggle fit as she toed off her heels and slung her legs over her handsome husband's (!) lap. For this moment Hannibal stands still beside Jack Crawford in a tuxedo, every article of his outfit black except for the cravat, which bleeds around his neck like his throat is freshly slit. (This association makes Alana feel a little sick, but she doesn't think she can stop her brain)

She's looking for him on the screen. No, closer. She can see _him._ She's looking for the man inside the cell. She's looking for the monster in that blue jumpsuit. His hair wasn't completely grey then. Now it's hard steel. That colorless blonde was still there.

"A kiss of birdlime, eyes of fire thou hast; Look at me, and I burn; touch me, and I’m held fast."

They're vows to no one in the audience, no matter how small it is. Then again, Hannibal never behaves ordinarily. He never has and never will.

It takes exactly fifteen minutes before she is weeping again. It starts in little sounds at first. Alana balls her fists into an expensive throw pillow. A thousand years in the past, Alana kisses Hannibal Lecter. A thousand years in the future, some would call it the present, Alana's tears degenerate into blubbery sobs that ring through the house in echoes.

She's been angry. Mostly, Alana Bloom has cried in moments where she was stricken by overwhelm. For the first time she is making a conscious choice to cry. For the first time in so long, the tears come and she expects them.

Freddie pads downstairs quietly ('I'll be right up' was forty-five minutes ago, and then those awful sounds started, those tearing sounds) and slinks to the couch where Alana is weeping into that velvet throw pillow. It takes only one glance at the television to know. It's Alana and Hannibal's reception, now, and somewhere off-screen Beverly Katz is telling and generously laughing at a filthy joke.

"Why?" Freddie just asks. She's a little scared when Alana doesn't answer but she can't take this intrusive, irritating sound anymore, "Why do you keep flogging yourself?"

In a miraculous display like the physical olive branch extended, Alana drops her right arm across the couch, her palm upturned. She's still crying, still sobbing, and maybe she doesn't even notice this small desire, this motion for comfort.

"I was-- I was-- I was so-- happy," Alana whines. Like testing the waters, Freddie just hovers her fingertips over that offered hand.

"I think you were," Freddie assures. The minute her hand touches Alana's the other woman crawls meekly forward, and Freddie experimentally pats awkwardly at Alana's back in nervous thumps, "I'd say you aren't anymore."

At the top of the stairs Applesauce is whimpering mightily. Paws scrabble lightly on the wood, one after the other, the dog still bleary-eyed from sleep.

"I was," Alana gasps helplessly, pushes her face into Freddie's side, "I was, I was...."

Freddie's hand curls around Alana's waist finally, holding her as still as is possible. She isn't shaking outright but she's getting close to it, but still, Freddie reminds herself, Alana is emitting those decibel-defying heavy sobs.

On the screen is Freddie herself, a hand poised at the bar, talking distractedly with a pretty little bartender far younger than she. She orders a glass of something with a paper umbrella to decorate it, removes and discards the thing, and peers across the room at the gorgeous bride and groom.

The click of little nails follows the soundless shuffling of bare feet. Katharine looks up at them both and Freddie just stares down to lock eyes with her, smoothing a hand over Alana's spine with each moment.

"Mama?" Katharine asks. Alana makes a sound (a very wet one) and untucks herself from Freddie, "you woke me up." 

"I-- I'm sorry, little darling," Alana whimpers, goes to say something else, but the moment she opens her mouth she's cut off.

"--Papa made you hurt. Uncle Will said so," Katharine cuts in, hanging onto Applesauce's fur with a sleepy little sway. Alana is up and uncoiled immediately, her eyes bloodshot. She's breathing in rattled little gasps, ones she tries to smother with sniffles.

"Jesus, what'd Uncle Will tell you?" She's running a hand through her hair, then, lightning quick, alert. Freddie marvels at it for just a moment. From going to pieces to conscious parenting. Is this a mother thing, or is it an Alana thing?

"Stuff," Katharine breezes quickly, "I don't like that he makes you sad. Did it hurt seeing him before, when you took me? Is he mean? He was nice to me. I thought he was a prince. But he did bad things so he can't be a prince. Princes don't do that. Please stop making loud sad noises. The sun hasn't even said good morning yet."

"Come here," Alana coos, and pretty much drags Katharine onto the couch (which is easy to do because she is half asleep, still rubbing her eyes). She peers up at the television and Freddie passes a hand through Katharine's hair delicately, careful not to pull. Alana's thinking, thinking, "Do you want to see when I married your Papa?"

"Will you stop being loud and sad?"

"She'll be quiet and sad," Freddie promises sarcastically.

"I won't," Alana shoots back quickly, and presses the 'rewind' button as she watches her life flicker by in reverse, "but we have to turn it off right after because it's very very late, little dragon, and all of Mama's friends are awful and say things not appropriate for little girls."

"Are you there?" Katharine twists around in Alana's arms, curiously prodding at Freddie. Applesauce bolts onto the couch and licks Alana's cheek quickly, lying down to rest her heavy head on Alana's thigh. Alana wonders if somewhere Hannibal is twitching. Paws on the Florentine couch, nails scraping across the soft leather.

"Of course. I even did all the pictures and the videos when she asked me to."

The DVD stops, clicks, starts over, and Katharine's father is a handsome prince, still and regal beside her godfather at the end of the aisle. This will be the first time she has ever seen him in the sunlight.

* * *

 

 

Freddie discovers a talent for crime thrillers that she writes with an enormous amount of knowledge and sensationalism. When she’s spent as much crazed time stalking the imbalanced, she’s created killers in her head well enough to write up a fancy Frankenstein of a serial murderer. Write, profit is mostly Freddie Lounds’ analogy these days. She figures she doesn’t need to endanger her own life when Abigail’s was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (thank god she is alive to tell it after the fiasco it took to get here) and Freddie figures it wouldn’t hurt, carving her name in stone. She’s well received. Accessible blogging, after all, has given her a devout little following and there is no cult like Internet success.

She comes home from book-signing at a Barnes and Noble to discover the dining room table, the long, imposing thing, is littered with items. Books and statues, trinkets, Alana’s whole damn life has been laid out. There's a copy of 'The Greek Anthology' on the table and it's the first thing that catches Freddie's eye. Some page torn out, some useless thing about a guy named 'Timarion' and birdlime ripped almost to pieces. She doesn't touch it, knows better.

“Where’s Katharine?” Is Freddie’s first statement, a little call into the annals of the house.

“Playdate!” Alana shouts back, dropping a stack of heavy folders and envelopes onto the table. Freddie is frozen, watching her closely, “I’m looking.”

“For your abandoned sanity…?” Freddie asks slowly, shrugs out of her blazer, “You’re piling up half the house, Doctor Bloom.”

“Alana,” Alana corrects, the way she sometimes does, “No. If he was—doing what it was he was doing, there must be evidence. There must be a sign of it. The Bureau overlooked it, but I’m his _wife._ If anyone could find it, it’s _got_ to be me.”

Everything inside Freddie is quickly at odds. _Yes, let’s find a kill room_ means resuscitating this story, means if they _do_ find something Freddie is back in business. On the other hand, this is frightfully disorienting, Alana in this kind of flushed whimsy, the sort that is panic-stricken. It was the wedding video. Freddie should destroy it. If the reaction’s bad, she’s got back-ups, at least. She could always remedy a nasty outburst. That video is always a catalyst for the worst.

“Jack Crawford has been over every inch of this house. I was surprised you weren’t forced to move out so the whole grounds could be sectioned off as evidence. He didn’t find anything, and I don’t think—“

“Help me,” Alana says, pushing aside a set of comical gargoyle bookends, “or see yourself out.”

“Now, you’re not allowed to do that. It isn’t fair to either of us, you telling me to get out, and me leaving you to your poor detective skills so you inevitably come across nothing.”

“Put that investigative talent where your mouth is and dig up some blood spatters at least, if you won’t be getting out of my way.”

Freddie grabs Alana’s wrists suddenly, leaning over the table to reach her, to keep contact, and Alana pauses, startled from shoving more useless shit over. She looks up quickly, an eyebrow shooting up in alarm, and Freddie says evenly in that voice of hers that leaves no nonsense, “You have to stop doing this.”

“Like I said. Are you going to help me or aren’t you?”

“I think that you’ve been at war with yourself far too long,” Freddie begins, lowers her gaze, very even, so Alana cannot look away, so that those very sharp blue eyes are viciously focal, “Don’t you think it’s time that you’ve won?”

“I have to figure this out,” Alana chokes, biting her lip, “You do it with me or I do it alone.”

“Let’s get to it, then."

* * *

 

The frescoed walls are still and silent, and if he touches them he feels the cool marble on his palms. She’s so small, his Katharine, what a beautiful baby girl. His sharp cheekbones, jagged things on her childish face, his broad shoulders, narrow hips. She’s handsome, he thinks, wonders if she will be beautiful when she grows. Of course she will be. Of course, for Alana Bloom is her mother.

He walks to the ornate 18th century bookcases that adorn her bedroom. They’re vast things, wide and beautiful in mahogany, their cabinets open like yawning embraces. He runs his fingers along the spines and he asks, “What shall we read today, dovanėlė?”

He keeps humming beneath his breath, a razor-sharp tone that slices the edges of each note. Throughout, however, the acoustics carry high and across the halls of this ornate domain. Above them both the stained glass ceiling glitters in captivating sunlight, catches a million colors. It appears just like the ceiling in the Victoria National Gallery of Melbourne, Australia. When he looks up at it, Hannibal’s eyes seem like ruby fireflies.

“Mama hates you, Papa. You know?”

Hannibal Lecter’s eyes open inside the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and when he listens, his heart is racing an elevated eighty-six beats per minute.

She’s tainted even his last defense.


	10. Regression

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A harrowing development puts Alana in a position to move forward after standing still, but is she capable of the motion or is she still a pawn, the king blocking her progress forward.

It becomes impossible to determine when Hannibal Lecter is awake or asleep. Chilton watches him, like monitoring prey, like waiting, but one can never figure out if what he's truly doing is sleeping. He isn't. Mentally he can see the pieces falling away, like dust blowing through his fingers where he held too tight. Katharine Mischa tells him that her Mama's going to serve him with divorce papers and her veins run black and she's a little girl with aubergine eyes and colorless blonde hair, missing her teeth, rotting away inside his own belly.

He feels diseased. Somewhere in the world there's a little girl encoded with his genetics and he's trapped behind glass like a slide beneath a microscope. Frederick Chilton is standing at the lens, and every so often he moves over to let Alana Bloom focus in closer. He feels angry, a slow burn of a sensation. His left ring finger itches.

Days pass by and for the first time in his isolation he loses count. He forgets how many hours whittle by each moment he closes his eyes. He finds the shadowed closets in his Mind Palace he thought he had laid to rest never to be seen again. They amass the hallways suddenly, tall, the wood on the doors rotting. From inside there are whispers. Katharine comes and goes without logic or word. The fabric of his mental reality tears. There's a feeling like festering inside of him (it is guilt) and he flirts with the possibility of insomnia. The world itself is an unreal haze outside his own mind. He has no friends anymore. Only demons.

Frederick Chilton wheels the television into Hannibal's hall and clicks it on. He walks away as Alana comes into focus on the screen, smothering a laugh at some inappropriate joke thrown by her little brother as she walks down the aisle on her own wedding day.

Hannibal's eyes slowly lift from the floor and spark to life. He watches himself on the tv, his eyes burning, but he doesn't know if it's in anger or sheer exhaustion.

* * *

 

 

"We don't hafta go back," Katharine says, a crayon held tight in her little fist. Alana has to restrain the urge to suggest she color the sun yellow when she colors it pink, because yellow is the color cheerful, well-adjusted children color their suns. Her hair is long and ravenously thick, and Alana's winding it patiently through her hands, "I don't want to."

"Go back where, little dragon?" Alana asks, picking up the blue crayon. She presses it to the page to shade the ocean but Katharine snatches it out of her hand, insistent. She's doing this herself. It's her beach, her project. She wanted the water to be green, anyway, where there are more plants and algae, "Hey. Not nice, Katharine Mischa."

"It's not nice to try to color somebody else's picture when you didn't ask, either," Alana sighs, because it is a good point, after all. Katharine hums and sweeps an armful of crayon shavings from the paper, smearing an array of colors across her the sleeve of her shirt, "I don't wanna visit Papa again."

"Is this because I was sad?" Alana schools her tone, eradicating the almost scolding sound of her voice, "because you know my being sad has nothing to do with you. It shouldn't affect the way you decide on things, Katharine."

"What was that thing Papa called me?" Katharine's outlining he clouds in silver-grey, "It sounded like a funny word. I haven't ever learned it before."

"Dovanėlė?" Alana's pronunciation is a surprisingly decent echo of his, but it's to be expected. He called her Dovana constantly, a lifetime ago, "It means a small gift. Sort of like a little present you get on Christmas."

Katharine glances at the wall clock, the fork and spoon cliche crossed over the countertop. Alana was the one who wanted it, such a weird, kitschy eyesore, but its absurdity is looked at lovingly. It's a bit of an escape, nowadays, from the half-decadence she lives in. The little hand is past the six and moving toward the seven, and the big hand is right on the six. When the big hand meets the twelve and the little hand the seven Aunt Freddie and Abigail will be here for dinner. She and Abigail will feed Applesauce a little under the table, but very secretly because if Mama discovers this Katharine will be in the worst trouble. Last time she had to recite two of her times tables out loud, which she just hates doing the way all children do.

"Is it because I've only seen him once before when it was last year? Like the way Christmas only comes once?"

"I don't really know why it is," Alana sits opposite her daughter, whose paper has become an amalgamation of color, and none of it traditional. She doesn't know why she strives for normalcy. It clearly isn't present here, "I think it's because that's what you are; a very small but very precious gift."

"Like the special camera Aunt Freddie gave me. Or the pretty fishing thing Uncle Will made just for me, and only I'm allowed to use it." She's a little proud of that, preening, putting down the crayon to sit up very straight. Alana smiles distractedly, but it's only because for a second she reminds her so much of Hannibal.

"Yes. Like those things. You're a precious gift similarly, but much, much better, and much, much more important."

"But if I'm a present somebody had to give me to Papa, and since you're Mama, didn't you give me to him?"

Alana's eyebrows shoot up briefly. Her mouth is dry, and for a moment she thinks she's close to tears, "I guess you're right."

"I don't think you can take me back if you don't wanna do that. I don't think you can return me like a Christmas present, Mama."

"Oh. And I never ever would want to. You are the best present. You're my present, too."

* * *

 

 

Alana and she share a brief smile before the doorbell rings, and Freddie and Abigail don't bother to wait for Alana to open it. Really the sound is just a warning.There are dark circles around Jack's eyes when he arrives, standing at Alana's doorstep like death himself. That's what he looks like, in that black overcoat and black hat, his countenance a hanging shadow. Her stomach does a little backflip, and she tells Katharine to go play in her room. Alana doesn't bother to check the stairwell before opening the door but she should because the child is crouching behind the banister, shushing Applesauce quickly.

"What's the raven doing perching on my chamber door?" Alana asks, her arms crossed, "good evening, Jack."

There's a haunted look in his brown eyes. Jack takes off his hat, leans in because he can't ever be sure if little ears are listening, "We found Miriam Lass."

Alana feels sick, suddenly, a little dizzy. She takes his arm by the coat like grabbing for balance to pull him inside and retreats on lighter feet to the kitchen, "Let's not do this in the hall."

Jack calls up the stairs, cupping his hands and dropping his voice so Alana can't hear, "Hey, little dragon! Scoot!"

Katharine hops up and waves to her godfather, who presses a finger to his lips. She follows suit, the gesture returned, a mutual promise.

* * *

 

 

"Missing an arm that had clearly been removed by a meticulous surgical hand. She'd been working as a ranch hand on a farm nearby a very suspicious barn nestled way out of the way. We tracked it with a few pine needles from one of Dr. Lecter's victims. By happenstance, we came across Miriam. Alana, she doesn't remember anything. Not about anything."

There's Alana's feeling of responsibility again, bubbling up. She presses it down, begins the process of coffee.

"It's not uncommon for victims of drastic trauma to ultimately repress the experience. I would imagine it was so traumatic she gutted everything and flung it far enough."

"We have her for questioning. I wanted to know if you would take her on as a patient."

Alana's frozen in place, paused. So far she's been run-of-the-mill for therapy. Kids of various ages dealing with prior domestic abuse, adopted kids and fear of abandonment. She's been distinctly out of this loop for awhile now, but there's a certain responsibility here, a level of trust Crawford is awarding her. She's afraid to wade back into the pool of trauma, frightened to submerge again in the heavy stuff. For awhile her own depression seemed too thick to penetrate. She almost named Katharine 'December'; something about the cold, long winter of her own heart.

"Would you call me the best candidate?"

"I'm confident in your talents. More than that, you fit the bill for a very specific niche."

The way Crawford says 'niche' flicks his tongue hard, just once, against the backs of his front teeth like the word is difficult to force out of his mouth.

"You want to give her a female therapist. Someone feminine, even, with a countenance that could be referred to as 'gentle' of 'unassuming'. You know I'll handle her with kid-gloves and you feel she'll be more prone to open up to me specifically."

"You're sharp as ever, Doctor Bloom."

Alana's turning her wedding ring impatiently, fidgeting with it.

"So this is one Ha-- Dr. Lecter left alive?"

"Miriam's conclusive with all the indications. Hannibal _was_ the last person recorded to have seen her, adding it up to what we know now. She has traits consistent with his skill set-- her very well removed arm, for one. So far, of the ones we've found, she's the only survivor."

"Besides me, potentially."

 _No,_ Alana knows, and somehow it's his voice in her head, _your significance was in collateral damage._

When she looks at her palms her nails have left little crescents. She breathes in, out. Wants to know why her mental mirage of him insists she is so insignificant. There are a lot of things about herself Alana Bloom doesn't like very much as of late.

Jack's gaze lingers briefly around the kitchen door. Katharine's slippery, he has learned. She's developed a talent for skulking around unnoticed, for passing quiet as a mouse under your very nose. He had to be careful what he says in this house because unsuited tiny ears tend to be listening, more often than not.

"I'm not sure if you were ever a target, Alana."

Alana shakes her head, pouring coffee, feeling numb, "If anything about this conversation is inconclusive, it's that."

* * *

 

 

She swears his skin has turned the color of old, spoiled pudding, a very strange kind of hue that's grey but not really. After a recent Beauty and the Beast re-watch she thinks it's the same color as 'the grey stuff'. But his eyes are dark as garnets and when she approaches the cell his head snaps aside like a wolf scenting blood. The gesture is unusual for Hannibal, a little hungry. She stops, turns her head and backtracks down the hall. His head eases down, his gaze leveling to the wall.

"Barney?" She asks quietly, slipping behind the doors to the monitoring area, "Would you allow me the privacy room, please?"

"I'm really not supposed to put him in there without warnin' Dr. Chilton first, Doctor Bloom."

"He's not permitted to monitor our sessions anyway. It's just. I think it would be beneficial toward what I want to ask him today. I think the glass may act as a hindrance."

Barney's eyebrows lift in questioning, and his brown eyes keep very soft, somehow a little concerned, "There's been some kinda development, hasn't there?"

"I can't talk about it," Alana says almost apologetically, and thinks with that sinking feeling in her gut about Miriam Lass and her amputated arm. She wants answers and she's come here for them, again, and the doubt alongside the desire constantly goads her. She wants answers and so far she's gotten none.

But she has bargaining chips, now. She's the wealthiest one here when it comes to Hannibal.

"He's been restless. Gave me a dissertation last night about the She-Wolf in the beginnin' of the the Divine Comedy. You promise me you'll keep a very careful distance."

* * *

 

 

"I know him, Barney," she lies, because now she does not know him at all, "I'll be okay."

"Was that my Wife to see me, Barney?" For the past few days Hannibal has been enormously rude to the staff. His cell is empty and his blankets are gone. Alana notes all this with a masked indifference that hides the simmering, seething rage she's going to unload on Chilton immediately after this visit, she promises herself. She's kind of relieved. In light of all this, she can use the catharsis. And she's sitting in the privacy room, then, patiently waiting for him.

She's never been alone with him in the privacy room. Katharine and Aunt Freddie, in that moment, are at home playing a game of Scrabble in which they both will tie and Freddie will try to cheat. She will not succeed because managing to get one by Katharine is impossible since she pays the utmost attention to games, as she does not like to lose. Alana imagines this to settle her nerves.

"Doctor Bloom, could you step outside for a second so I can set him up, please?"

"Good evening, Doctor Bloom," Hannibal says, and his red eyes scan her over with a shuddering calm that makes her feel exposed. And a little like a lamb chop, which doesn't bode well because in addition to the weird, tingly discomfort she thinks she's eaten human lamb chop. Alana winds around the table and steps out of the room, the door clicking shut, locking behind her.

She swallows a bit of nausea in the privacy of the hall.

Barney startles her when he steps out and she jumps a little, turning quickly to look at him. She doesn't realize how distracted she was.

"I don't get any audio in there but I got a video monitor in my office. I'll be watchin' in case anything goes wrong so if you feel the jitters jus' holler at the camera. You can't miss it, it's in the upper right corner of the room. You're gonna be fine, Doctor Bloom."

"Thank you," she smiles, a thin effort. Barney doesn't get paid nearly enough for this job.

* * *

 

 

"To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?" His body language is strange, taut. It reminds her of one of Will's fishing reels when he's caught a great big bass. But Hannibal, for a man whose upper body imposes with great ease, with shoulders and chest, with broad physical promise, is usually fluid. He's ordinarily graceful, languid, almost serpentine in movement. He could enter and leave a room without ever whispering a footstep. And now she can see where his bones snag as his hands move, the ugly spaces of his knuckles.

"Crawford's Agent-in-training, Miriam Lass. She's been found." She wants to hit him hard and fast. His eyes are ringed in weary circles. They tell Alana he hasn't been sleeping. She wishes she could shed this compassion. Before when he couldn't sleep, he would rest his head in her lap and she would speak to him in the cadence of Poe's The Raven, tracing her fingers across the heavy lines in his face, and she would feel the weight of his body as it fell away to deadening slumber.

This thought is intrusive. She remembers that positive pregnancy test and the way it felt like an icy shock the first time she was ever called a 'single parent'. The fondness drains out of her pores.

"In one piece?" She can tell it's a distasteful joke, a jab, but it lacks his mirthful delivery. He sounds exhausted, but his hands are flat on the table, his right covering his left.

"Missing one," and she has the evidence now. She's realizing it. Alana's breathing is as steady as she can get it, because she feels like she's going to cry. The room is very small and her husband of four very happy years who is now the condemned father of her beautiful daughter is a serial killer and she is about to be the therapist to his only surviving victim (but that can't be true because Alana knows she is the victim too, she knows, she has to be, but now no one can see where he's hurt her), "how could you do this, Hannibal? How? Where did you have it inside of you to hurt someone like this?"

There's nothing on his face but fatigue. He looks older than he is and his hair is the same grey now as iron, cold and unforgiving.

She calls him by his first name for the first time in about six years.

"She came very close to me. She was at-risk, and I never would have harmed her had she left well enough alone. Had she not pursued some misbegotten hunch that I was the 'Chesapeake Ripper', as the tabloids howled."

"You _are_ the Ripper. _I_ was so close. Me. Were you killing when we were together? Slipping out in the middle of the night to cannibalize some insurance adjuster or census taker? To kill some kid who stumbled upon wherever you kept your bodies? I was so close, Hannibal, me. Were you going to kill me?"

"You were never close," his accent thickens with lethargy, his words almost lazy, syllables thick as honey in his mouth, "you were the furthest away."

"Spare me your sentiment."

"Sentiment is what I have, Dovana, instead of a view."

She gets nowhere and she leaves angry, abrupt and embarrassed and scrubbing tears from her face. She went in there his Wife, should've gone in his psychiatrist, doesn't know why she went in at all.

When she gets back to her car she squeezes her fists around the steering wheel and leans in, pressing her forehead against the leather. Hannibal's escorted back to his cell, amiably discussing with Barney Plato and Socrates, but there's no gusto to his tone. He lies down on his bare cot and his bare walls, listening to the sound of her calling him 'Hannibal' playing on a loop inside his ears. Just outside the Baltimore Hospital for the a Criminally Insane Alana Bloom swallows hard, coils against her seat, and screams.


End file.
